A lot of Belgian beers use sugar to aid digestability. How about other things like dry rice extract or honey?
A bit of ‘Date Syrup’ is used in some of the Monasteries recipes.
You can get this one on Amazon:
Some brewers of Belgian beers use honey. However, Belgian Candi sugar, or “rocks” as they like to call them, are the preferred ingredient. The color of the Candi sugar - from white to very dark brown - adds flavor, color and boosts ABV.
This company sells virtually the same product, but in a liquid form.
Honey might work OK. I would avoid using rice extract. Brown sugar might be another possibility. I recently made an Old Peculiar clone recipe and used an 8 oz. cone of Mexican brown sugar in the batch. It came out great but the style was not Belgian at all. Someone already mentioned date sugar and I believe I have seen a recipe calling for raisins…
Just some thoughts. Throwing it out there.
Can you give me an example of a Belgian brewery using rock sugar? I haven’t been able to find one.
According to some old recipes, Chimay used corn at one point.
My thought was that the dry rice extract would ferment out like sugar.
Probably. If that’s what you’ve got, go for it.
I believed Chimay and Rochefort still use a percentage of wheat starch.
You’d be surprised what ingredients they actually use as opposed to what we would use to “clone” them. Rochefort uses a Sinamar type product in all three of their beers. Most of the Trappists, with the exception of maybe a Westvleteren, aren’t using dark syrups at all.
You could use either a corn starch or wheat starch. The deal would be to add fermentable sugars without the proteins and other materials found in grains or other adjuncts.
You have to think about the economics of using rice, which in turn depends on agriculture. Rice doesn’t grow in northern Europe, so is something that has to be imported. That might work in the days of colonial empires in Asia, but not really now. As a random example, right now British homebrew shops have flaked rice at double the cost of flaked barley, wheat or oats.
Belgian brewers are nothing if not cheap, they’re not going to use an ingredient that costs twice as much as similar adjuncts.
If I’m not mistaken, in the book titled “Brew Like A Monk” it is stated that in order to save money the Trappist Monasteries use a lot of plain old granulated white table sugar in their beers, which in Belgium is all derived from beets as opposed to cane (though the granulated sugar end products of beets and cane are likely to be essentially identical).
According to a book I recently finished called: Brew Like a Monk, by Stan Hieronymus, most, if not all, of the following Belgian breweries use, or used, “Rocks” (Candi sugar) as a form of boosting ABV, adding flavor, complexity and color to their Blond, Golden, Dubbel and Dark Strong beers.
Anchel
Chimay
Orval
Rochefort
Westmalle
Westvleteren
A few things:
1.) BLAM is one of my favorite brewing related books. With that said, it’s 15 years old and some of the information for specific breweries, notably at Rochefort, was already in flux during its writing or immediately after its release. Here is some Rochefort specific info I put together a little while back:
https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=33089.0
2.) The Belgians, the Trappists in particular, use sugars that are generally cheap and bought in bulk. They have a pretty strong industry for sugars and bulk amounts of a variety of sugars are available. Some have been purported to use rocks and there is some anecdotal info in a variety of sources, including BLAM, that rock sugar is used at least at Rochefort. Rock sugar will give color but not much flavor. In the end it doesn’t matter. In reality, only Westvleteren has the hallmarks of the dark syrups that are nearly ubiquitous in homebrew recipes. Most of the other Trappist beers have yeast derived, not syrup derived, flavors that dominate.
You can pretty much use any sugars you’d like to replicate the profile of at least the beers from Chimay, Rochefort, Achel, La Trappe and Westmalle. I believe most of the homebrew versions of at least dark Trappist ales (understanding there will be exceptions) are actually targeting Westvleteren almost unconsciously and will require dark syrups as “par for the course”.
As always, YMMV.
Rice extract ferments out very dry and I would not use it in a Belgian beer.
“Brew Like A Monk” is an awesome book for sure.
Candi sugar or candi syrup would be the sugar of choice since it comes in different SRM’s…
But sugar ferments out very dry, also. What’s the difference?
I don’t know. I have used rice extract before and it does work well to boost alcohol. Just not a huge fan of it overall. I’m not sure if regular sugar ferments out as dry as rice extract. I don’t have that information available right now. Maybe I could look it up.
Maybe there would be no difference. I don’t know. Just seems odd putting something used in Budweiser into a Belgian beer…
Yes, cane sugar ferments out completely, just like rice extract. I care more about the result than recreating the ingredients or process.
I agree. Results are what matter the most.
Fascinating information indeed. Thank you for sharing!