I’ve never used table sugar in a recipe. Im making a saison and want to dry the beer out and have read that cane sugar/table sugar is the way to proceed.Is belgian candy sugar the same? Can it be used as an equal substitute and does it also dry out the beer?
Both sugars will provide nearly fully fermentable forms of sugar and will have the effect of drying the beer. Table sugar is more refined and so had little in the way of any other flavor contribution. Belgian candi sugar can come in various colors which represents degrees of being caramelized. The darker the candi sugar, the more you would likely notice flavor contribution. I think clear candi sugar and table sugar would likely produce similar effects even though they are chemically different.
From “The Google”
Candi sugar is a Belgian sugar product commonly used in brewing beer. It is particularly associated with stronger Belgian style ales such as dubbel and tripel. Chemically, it is an unrefined sugar beet derived sugar which has been subjected to Maillard reaction and caramelization.
It will tend to dry out a beer but IMHO not as much as table sugar (sucrose) or because of the caramalization. It is also a lot more expensive than table sugar. I used to use it in my Tripel but after Denny did a presentation at Homebrew Con 2019 where the audience could not tell the difference between table sugar and candi sugar in the samples, I switched to table sugar to save money and could not tell the difference either. So I would say use table sugar and you will be fine.
Sidebar, I use dextrose (corn sugar) in my West Coast IPA’s which tends to dry these beers out somewhat as well.
FWIW Duvel uses dextrose. As noted above, all three plain sugars (table, dextrose, clear candi) will dry out the beer, and keep out of the way flavor wise. Table sugar is 100% fermentable extract by weight, while both dextrose powder and candi syrup contain some water weight, making it a little trickier to calculate how much fermentable sugar they contribute. The biggest difference is, candi will cost you $6-8 for a pound of syrup that’s only partly sugar, and table sugar is already in your cupboard and easy to measure and handle. Winner.
Another brewing myth/wives tale left in the dust of history. When I first started brewing in the Neolithic era - early 1980’s - every brewing book I could get my hands on warned against using cane sugar as it would invariably leave you with cidery beer. As I recall the world was still flat and the center of the universe at that time.
Candi sugar is a waste of money IMO. You get no flavor from it, so why not use table sugar?
That comes from the days of “a kit and a kilo”. You’d buy a liquid extract kit and the recipe would have you add a kilo of sugar. Unfortunately, the extract was usually stale and since the sugar had no flavor it didnt cover up the stale extract. The sugar hot the blame, not the extract which was the real cause.
The cidery flavor is a result of stressed yeast. Back then, common homebrew practice being “a can of LME and as many bags of sugar as you could get hold of,” lack of nutrients would stress the yeast something awful. As long as there’s enough malt or a little yeast nutrient added, sugar is a perfectly legit ingredient.
(You’ll notice that some really old recipes, from George Washington to prohibition era homebrew, called for boiling bran with the fermentables. This provided some minerals and other stuff which served as some nutrients for the yeast. Some old timers had at least partly figured it out!)
As I said above, my experience and research leads me to believe that it was more likely the extract. Dan Listermann did some research and experiments with it back in the 90s.
And the science says it’s stressed yeast due to lack of certain nutrients that gives a flavor described as “cidery.” But crappy extract wouldn’t make it taste better, either!
Reality often astonishes theory
It’s okay. The universe isn’t constituted on Berkeleian, Idealist principles. Reality doesn’t require your observation or belief in order to persist.
Not one to be verbose, table sugar it is!
Cheers to all!