Best replacement for Sugar in a recipe?

[WishboneBrewery]

Just looking through a few GW recipes and there are a fair amount with White Sugar as an Ingredient.
I suppose its there to lighten the body / cheapen the brewing / add more alcohol.

Though if I wanted to make an unadulterated ale, would it be best to just remove the sugar and up the pale malt (the logical choice) or leave the malt as-is and add an adjunct like Flake Barley or Maize or even Rice so as not to add any unneeded body??

Cheers

[WishboneBrewery]

yeah, fair comment. I'm pretty sure I'm not a fan of Maize now, though I'll have to use up the 1.5kg I have in something! I wonder if it could be hidden in a stout?
I was just thinking of using the Jennings Cumberland Ale recipe in BYORA as a starting point anyway, so preferred to leave out the sugar.

cheers

[OldSpeckledBadger]

yeah, fair comment. I'm pretty sure I'm not a fan of Maize now, though I'll have to use up the 1.5kg I have in something!

Why suffer an ingredient you're not keen on? Put it out for the birds.

[WishboneBrewery]

I like to use things I buy, even if its 'cheap cheap' stuff

[boingy]

I'm with Chris on this one. The sugar is in the recipe for a reason. Replacing it with malt will make a different beer. Not necessarily a bad beer, just a different one.

Years ago a HB shop recommended me to use using glucose in place of invert sugar in Dave Line's recipes which seemed to work very well.

And on the subject of DL, his recipe for Wadworth's 6x used a fair wodge of flaked maize, iirc. It was one of my fave DL recipes at the time (although I think it also featured some invert sugar).

[WishboneBrewery]

I notice that a few mild recipes in the GW book have some maize.
I'll just stick bits in stuff

[Tricky]

I've got a keg with an experimental brew using half a kilo of maize to replace a tin of golden syrup. It's drinkable but ill not be making it again. Might be ok to use in a lager though?

[raiderman]

Maize has a legitimate well had a legitimate purpose in brewing, being to help overcome problems with amercian barley which was too high in nitrogen, so maize was used to dilute it. Obviously it didn't take brewers long to realise that maize makes cheaper alcohol than barley and to continue using it on cost grounds. So there shouldn't be any good reason to use it in homebrew and I'd shun any recipe that calls for it on taste grounds as well as principal, it very readilly influences the flavour of the brew and corn ends up the dominant taste. Rember Colt.45 ? bloody awful.