Christmas beer – brew your own

In this colder days, you’ll probably want to switch from those refreshing lagers and pale ales to something a little bit more on the warm side. Imperial Stouts and robust porters are the obvious choices, but a strong Belgian ale may be a better choice if you’re aiming for those spicy flavors that announce that Christmas is here.

So today, we’ll be brewing a Belgian Quadruppel. But with a twist. We’ll be making our own candi sugar!

The plan is simple: we’ll start by inverting the sugar (sucrose) into glucose and fructose. Mix 2 tablespoon DME per 1 kg sugar with 350ml of water and the juice of 2 lemons, as you need an acidic solution to make this work. Raise the temp to 125C for 20 minutes at. You now have inverted sugar!

Now the dangerous part begins. I cannot overstate the importance of wearing full sleeves, gloves and goggles while doing this. You’ll be adding water to a mixture that is standing at 125C, so you’ll have instant water vapor trying to escape the inverted sugar.

We need an alkaline water to make the Maillard reaction happen. We used a ph 8.5 bottled water, but you can make your tap water alkaline by adding a teaspoon of baking soda to 500ml of water. Add the water very, very slowly and raise temperature to 145C (275-290F). Hold at this temperature until the desired color and flavor is achieved.

In fact, you can skip all this trouble by buying 1kg of candi sugar on your local brew shop and following the recipe below. But as brewers, we like trouble, isn’t it?

Hope you have fun doing this.
Merry Christmas everyone!

Batch size – 50L
OG: 1094 | 9,8% abv
FG: 1020 | 27 IBU

6 Kg Pilsner
2 Kg Aromatic
0,5 Kg Cara20
0,5 Kg Chocolat Malt
0,5 Kg Special B
0,5 Kg Flaked wheat
1Kg Candi Sugar

Mash 69C for 75m
Mash out 76C for 10m
Boil 90m

20g Hallertau Taurus – 60m
30g Northern Brewer – 10m
20g Coriander seed (crushed) – 10m

Yeast: Mangrove Jacks M47