Anyone have experience with dark brown sugar (i.e. refined sugar + molasses), specifically in a BDSA? Google is turning up surprisingly little, and that makes me nervous.
I thought I had a full pound of turbinado but it turns out my former roommate was a big fan of it in his coffee. :
I don’t think I would go too heavy with dark brown sugar (maybe a little wouldn’t hurt), but perhaps if you end up reducing some of the Special B in your recipe to compensate/offset for the increased molasses flavor, it might work out…I personally would simply use table sugar, if pressed, between the two. I guess it also depends what other malts you have going into this batch.
I just think that my attempts with molasses (straight up) have not been satisfactory. YMMV, of course.
I guess I recipe would help! Pretty basic, bit of a kitchen-sink batch. By weight:
50% Rahr pale
22.5% Weyermann Pils
10% Munich I
7.5% Munich II
2.5% CaraMunich II
2.5% Special B
5% a sugar to be named later.
Use white sugar, and just enough blackstrap to get the calculated color you were aiming for? IOW reconstruct your own demerara? Just a thought. You won’t duplicate the flavor of the dark Belgian syrup either way, and you have the color covered, so maybe my vote goes to white sugar just for fermentability. (I’ve been playing around at learning to make invert syrups and can tell there’s a big difference between them and the sugar they start with.)
After some more research I found that a pound of dark brown sugar is about an ounce of molasses (plus I really didn’t want to go out in a snowstorm) so I just went with it. I will try to remember to update with tasting notes.
FWIW, I recently brewed up a BDSA with 12 oz of molasses and 1.5# of cane sugar. I really like the combination and the molasses addition plays really well with the Special B too. This was for a 6.5 gallon batch.
That sounds AWESOME!
Have you ever looked into making invert sugar. English brewers used to use it all the time. Invert #3 will give you a darker color while having a fairly neutral flavor contribution.