Using invert sugar

[BobM]

I want to make Dave Line's Thomas Hardy ale and it specifies Invert sugar and I read that Golden Syrup is invert sugar but judging from the topic here Invert sugar comes in different forms.
Any tips on using this would be appreciated.

[Garth]

Golden syrup is partially inverted sugar. It's not exactly the same thing. Breweries get something called Invert No 1, I think it's this you need if you want to faithfully stick to the recipe. HBS will probably sell it.

I put Lyles in a beer once, it wasn't brilliant and gave you a bloody awful hangover in the morning.

[boingy]

Years ago when I was brewing Dave Line recipes my LHBS told me to use glucose in place of invert sugar which I did with great success across many brews.

[BobM]

Thanks for the info guys.

[yogester]

I bought some Invert Sugar from http://www.hbingredients.co.uk/ last week for an upcoming recipe from Shut Up About Barclay Perkins for a 1952 JW Lees Best Mild.

Shipping is £10 though....

[lupulin]

You can easily fake it with regular sugar. You can also make invert sugar very easily. It's just a matter of boiling sugar in water to make a syrup, and then adding a little citric acid (or a squeeze from a lemon) during the boil. The acid is what 'inverts' the sugar.

[Jerry Cornelius]

It seems that refined sugar isn't what you want to use. Raw cane sugar is the stuff, according to this article.

Asda sell raw cane sugar and there's a recipe for making the stuff here. I have to say I've never tried any of this though.

[richc]

You can easily fake it with regular sugar. You can also make invert sugar very easily. It's just a matter of boiling sugar in water to make a syrup, and then adding a little citric acid (or a squeeze from a lemon) during the boil. The acid is what 'inverts' the sugar.

This process is trivially easy and you can, depending on when you stop boiling, you can alter the darkness of the sugar to exactly what you want.

[koomber]

Normal sugar is sucrose which is made from 2 smalle sugars, glucose and fructose. The process of inverting sugar breaks the bond between the two smaller sugars causing the sucrose to turn into a mix of glucose and fructose.

I think this was probably to conserve yeast energy reserves in the inital fermentation to prevent them becoming stressed. However, these days yeast is very well managed so should have sufficient energy reserves to carry out this step.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_sugar_syrup

[Bribie]

Invert sugar used to be very popular in Late Victorian and early 20th century brewing. Probably due to the perception that plain sugar could "stress" the yeast. One clever method they used was the Tompson's process which I've never tried but must get around to someday
What you do is to take some spare yeast (couple of old sachets or some yeast cake etc) - rehydrate it as necessary and pour into a solution of your batch of cane sugar at 55 degrees C. This zaps the yeast pretty quickly but apparently the yeast still produces the invertase enzyme at that temperature and that cracks the bond of the sucrose. Then you tip the whole lot into the kettle where the cooked yeast eventually passes through as a yeast nutrient in the finished brew. Clever because if using a lot of sugar like they did during the wars etc, a bit of nutrient wouldn't go astray.

Sounds like cruelty to poor yeast.

Reference: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Ency ... /Materials