Real Caramel

[rshortt]

Hi everyone,

I have searched the forums for people using caramel in their ciders for flavour and / or sugar for fermentation. I've only found people using grain malts for caramel flavour.

Has anyone tried using real caramel from cooking sugar on the stove?

As I'm thinking of trying this some questions come to mind.

1) Dissolving the caramel into the cider. Caramel is fairly solid, would I need to heat my cider before pitching the yeast in order to dissolve it?

2) Would my yeast (and it may depend on which yeast) digest the caramel sugars?

3) Would the answer to #2 depend on which sugar I used to make the caramel? I'm wondering if caramel could be made from dextrose.

What are your thoughts?

-Rob

 

[d510addict]

Well I'm no hb expert but am decent with cooking and food, I think maybe using a sugar based caramel wouldn't be all that awesome if you're thinking about the flavor of those candies which are dairy based caramels.

For dissolving it though I would use just a bit of the juice add the caramel when the juice is warm don't boil it though and stir so the caramel doesn't burn.

Yeast should eat it, its still sugar

Use table sugar if you are going to try caramel, corn sugar caramel sounds terrible, plus the flavor would be off even if you could get it to melt and caramelize properly.

 

[gregbathurst]

Brown sugar is just sugar with caramel added I think so that would be easiest. If you make your own caramel you could dissolve it in water first before adding, you don,t need to heat the whole cider.
Edit; perhaps brown sugar in the US is a different product. That would explain a lot. Try to get some Australian brown sugar.?

 

[rshortt]

Wikipedia's telling me that brown sugar is sugar plus molasses, not caramel, and molasses is a byproduct of processing sugar cane into sugar.

 

[Teromous]

You could make your own caramel of sorts by using something like molassas and vanilla, that way you could skip out on the dairy. Just a suggestion.

 

[Teromous]

Wikipedia's telling me that brown sugar is sugar plus molasses, not caramel, and molasses is a byproduct of processing sugar cane into sugar.

Ah beat me to it! :cross:

 

[gregbathurst]

Brown sugar in Australia is definitely sugar with caramel, I don't know about the UK.

I must say I was wondering why so many people were adding brown sugar to their cider, it seemed very odd but now I understand.

 

[Apollofrost]

My last batch I used brown sugar and honey, a nice mix but not really a caramel flavor.

Edit: If you want a caramel type flavor why don't you try serving it with a shot of butterscotch schnapps?

 

[Tusch]

Brown sugar in Australia is definitely sugar with caramel

That seems very odd to me, I'm not saying you're wrong of course I don't live there haha. I just had never heard this before and tried to do some digging but that didn't really get me anywhere. Couldn't really find any info on Australian brown sugar but I'd love to be enlightened

 

[gregbathurst]

I suspect brown sugar in the UK is the same as Australia, definitely a different product to US brown sugar (think of the stones song). Your brown sugar we would call raw sugar. Our brown sugar is used to make caramel things like fudge or toffee, we also have a syrup called golden syrup which is a thick treackly liquid form.

 

[rshortt]

Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar product with a distinctive brown color due to the presence of molasses. It is either an unrefined or partially refined soft sugar consisting of sugar crystals with some residual molasses content, or it is produced by the addition of molasses to refined white sugar.

Natural brown sugar is a name for raw sugar which is a brown sugar produced from the first crystallisation of the sugar cane. As such "natural brown sugar" is free of additional dyes and chemicals. There is more molasses in natural brown sugar, giving it a higher mineral content.

Source: wikipedia

 

[Walker]

In the US we get raw sugar, which is unrefined. It is light brown in color and usually has a texture like coarse rock salt. It is sometimes also called "turbinado" sugar.

If this is processed, the outcome is granulated white sugar and molasses.

If you mix those two back together, you get brown sugar. SMall moist granules that can be packed together sort of like wet sand.

The raw and brown sugars don't taste anything alike. I suppose this is because brown sugar as a more of the "impurities" in it than the raw sugar does.

 

[gregbathurst]

I've seen the wikipedia article, obviously written by an American. You should realise wikipedia is often unreliable and incomplete. I guess in regards to raw sugar/ molasses we don't have the equivalent of your brown sugar, or I'm not aware of it.
Remember brown sugar is just a description, not a definition or trademark. words like jelly and biscuit mean completely different things in America and Australia.

 

[Yuri_Rage]

While the great sugar debate is interesting, it isn't exactly helpful. Considering that we're advising a guy in North America, adding brown sugar to his cider isn't going to produce the flavor he's after. Neither, however, is caramel candy. It is full of fat (usually a dairy fat of some sort), which is not going to make for a very good cider. Instead, consider using a caramel flavoring or some blonde/amber candi sugar.

 

[jcobbs]

Check out the May 7, 2009 Basic Brewing Radio podcast (www.basicbrewing.com) for a discussion on making candi syrup. The guest, Joshua Smith, gives some great details on how to make candi syrup by carmelizing sugar, with a lot of specifics on the taste/aroma characteristics of various colors of syrup and how to achieve the desired taste/color profile with careful temperature control. If you really want to pursue this, you might want to try carmelizing your own candi syrup.

 

[gregbathurst]

I think a caramel flavouring would tend to overwhelm a cider while a candi syrup would be more subtle - not that I've ever used either.

 

[d510addict]

Your best bet tbh is to go to food-network website find a caramel candy recipe get a candy thermometer so you can pull it before it goes into a crack stage and experiment. Its cheap to make and easy to clean (just boil the pot to dissolve the sugars. But you will end up with a product that will produce a very similar flavor as malt dark almost bitter flavor would be good in a dark beer but possible overpower the light cider taste. Although I think it would produce a very good flavor for something like the Graff if used in addition to the DME (would add more depth and balance to the maltyness which some people complain about. Would also be a good coloring agent.

 

[corexcore]

Caramel in itself is just a carefully, lightly burned sugar though, isn't it? So I think that the original poster is asking about is whether he could use dextrose to make a caramel through a moisturizing and then cooking process. I can only assume that he could and that it would probably be at least somewhat fermentable. I don't know if the heat would alter the molecules to the point that they would no longer be useful for yeast, but that seems unlikely. Try it!

 

[d510addict]

So i stole your idea and tried a caramel type sugar in a 1 gallon batch. I heated up 1 cup sugar with 1 tbs water. Slowly heated it up on med heat till it got bubbly and slightly browning on the edges. Dont stir at all till you see a golden color showing up. Then I added 2 tsp vanilla extract and stirred added 2 cups aj stirred to cool and dissolve the caramel. Once it was dissolved in the aj I cooled it added to carboy and threw in some aj yeast and more aj. Smells good lets see how it tastes in a month.

 

[rshortt]

I have to wait another week and a bit to free up a carboy and I'll give it a shot too. Thanks for all the replies guys.

 

[Kauai_Kahuna]

In the US, not all brown sugar is brown sugar. Most is regular sugar with a little molasses added back in and charged more for.

To create a caramel / inverted sugar your also need to add some acid to break down the sugar in the heat, some people use DAP, I just add some lemon juice during the boil.

There are a lot of threads here that cover creating belgian candy or just plain inverting sugar.

In short, you add sugar, half a tsp of DAP / juice from one lemon, a couple of tsp of water to make a thick liquid and start to heat.

Keep adding a tsp of water to keep it from crystallizing until you hit your soft crack/hard crack desired temperature / colour / flavour. Light B is soft crack, Dark B is hard crack.
Inverting sugar. (I think, I'm doing this off of a failing memory)

* Soft Ball * 115C 239F
* Hard Ball * 127C 260.6F
* Soft Crack * 135C 275F
* Hard Crack * 150C 302F

 

[d510addict]

You dont need acid at all. Just cane sugar (table sugar) a wee bit of water and slowly melt it till it starts to turn color then start stirring till it darkens (the darker the more bittery type flavors will come out) carefully add vanilla extract stir off heat and add in aj but carefully (this stuff is super hot).