floydmeddler wrote:Hey Spud. Sugar ferments 100% so thins the beer out - this is why it's used so much in Belgians. Honey isn't 100% fermentable but not far off - I think! In all my experience so far (admittedly only with S04 and WLP005) honey has pulled the gravity down. I'm tempted to take another gravity read now but promised myself I'd wait till Thursday... Airlock still ever so gently bubbling every 8 seconds or so - so something is happening in there. Not too much I hope!
I knew I would come across wrong.
The way it was explaned to me was as follows
"Sugar doesn't "add dryness" I think the terms that are used have led to some confusion on the Internets; if you already have a beer that starts out at an OG of say 1.059 and has a theoretical FG of 1.012 adding more sugar WILL NOT help it dry out more. (This is clearly what some posters on some forums think this means.)
-If you, however replace 10 of those original gravity points with gravity points from simple sugar (remove a percentage of basemalt and replace it with simple sugar) the FG will finish lower then. -Say 1.010 just as a random theoretical number.
I've seen US homebrewer board posts where someone has brewed a HUGE OG barley wine or a medium OG Saison and they don't hit the FG that they wanted and someone recommends "pitching some sugar to dry it out" -that's kinda crazy talk. I think someone is confusing the practice of REPLACING some of the basemalt with simple sugar to dry a beer out and the idea of saving some of your sugars for later into fermentation to avoid osmotic shock on yeast which will help them continue to ferment a SUPER high ABV down more than it would be able to other wise with this practice of just adding some sugar to coax fermentation along and result in a lower FG.
Adding more points of sugar obviously isn't going to help the problem of an already too sweet beer."
He went on to say
"I'll summarize the internet myth on sugar "drying out a beer" like this:
"Feeding yeast simple sugars super-charges them in a similar way that it makes little kids hyper and causes the yeast to eat more of the residual sugars left in the beer, resulting in a dryer beer. If you have a beer with too high of an FG; just feed your beer some sugar. -It's like "Red Bull for yeast!"
This idea is most certainly a myth and is not true at all.
REPLACING some of the sugar in your wort that is derived from malt with sugar that is derived from simple sugars will result in a dryer finish; that's true.
Some SUPER high gravity brewers keep aside part of the sugars in their recipe and feed them to the beer throughout fermentation to coax them into continuing to ferment longer. -That true but is an edge case and it is a regime that was originally designed for a particularly crazy yeast strain US-099 (which tastes like crap and you shouldn't use, by-the-way). -It's also NOT "adding more sugar to super charge the yeast"; it's not adding more sugar at all; it's just saving some of the sugar for later in the fermentation process."
I've brewer I stole these quotes from is very educated in the art
