I think it might be tied to the theory that you eat with your eyes first. Same could be said for a glass of beer. I just think that the BMC in a glass is unappealing, it is so pale that I just shudder when I see it. I would drink it from a bottle or can before I drank from a glass. Maybe if they added some color to it it might be more appealing. Might be the theory at Fosters.
No, it's because it's a beer based on an ENGLISH BITTER, and English Bitters often use a colorant.
They do it much like belgian add sugars, so as not to make the body of the beer any thicker than it is, and not to raise the gravity.
Sinamar is basically steeped, debitter carafa in a liquid form.
So, when would one add the caramelized sugar? The secondary ferment? The bottle conditioning? If caramel syrup is what I think it is (that really sticky, brown stuff you heat up and pour on top of vanilla ice cream), then it seems that it has some serious potential. It'd be like honey, except not.
Although some English breweries use Treacle or Lyles' Golden syrup like this, what we're talking about here, is not sugary and has little if any fermentabilty. It's just to compensate for any inconsistencies in variences in the grainbill to bring it into the srm range of the style WITHOUT changing the flavor of the beer by adding more darker, roastier flavored grains.
You're making a beer in the 18th century where the gain wasn't consistently roasted as well as it is today. Now we use roasters fired by gas or electricity or whatever, BUT back in the day it was usually just done with fire, so it wasn't necessarily going to be even all the time...and too much roasting was going to make burnt or smoky grain, so you maybe only took it so far.
The SRMs of your brewery's ordinary bitter is supposed to be 14 srms, but because the darker grains weren't kilned and roasted as well this batch, or you get it from different suppliers and it's all over the place from batch to batch and your beer ends up coming only to about 10 srms from time to time. So you have two choices, you could add some more darker malts to the grain bill, but that is going to alter the flavor of them, or you add a "tea" made of a little burnt sugar dilluted with water or some steeped "grain tea", which isn't converted made with some dark debittered grains.
If you're brewing for commercially for consistency in a brewery back then, where you have a set flavor profile (or even today) are you gonna add more grain which changes the flavor, or are you just going to tweak the color in a way that won't change things?
Another example is a schwartzbier, a black lager, (which for all intents and purposes the Shiner Bock Yuri mentioned is) It's a lager, and a pretty light one at that, so I don't necessarily want to throw every dark grain in my arsenal in there, because it's going to then have a lot of roasty and bitter notes, and might taste like joe blow's schwarzbier the next brewery over, so I'm going to a light, sweet, maybe caramally grainbill with a tiny hint of roast, but that's going to make my beer not fit into the srms for the style, so I'm going to achieve some of my blackness through debittered carafa colorant.
It's really not a hard concept to grasp. And it's not done out of maliciousnes or anything other than consistency.
But andvari7 you can add flavor sugars like mollasses, caramels (if they have no dairy in them) golden syrup, treacle, etc. at any of the times you mentioned. Typically a lot of stuff is added to the boil...some fermentables are added post yeast pitch in secondar or primary, OR you can bottle with it. There are discussion on here about all of those. If you're interested in bottling with alternative fermentables, check out my bottling sticky, I think it's the bottom of post 8, that I cover how to do it.
