Sweeten up the brewed beer ?

madhatter76

Hi, I made up two of the the "Make Your Own Beer Czech Pilsner" and its pretty nice stuff and as expected hoppy bitter.

http://www.homebrewwest.ie/make-your-own-beer-czech-pilsner-2298-p.asp

I know some of the czech beers (for example Gambrinus) have additionally some superb sweetness with it.

Could anyone experienced advise how to get a sweetness into a beer.

I've put 1KG of light spraymalt + 500g brewing sugar + some honey into the worth but all it changed was to subjective increase the vol% without any noticeable change in taste towards sweetness. I've tried to add some more sugar (.7l 3 tablespoons of sugar) at bottling into a few bottles just to see a difference but all I got were a few nice time bombs (keyword: bang at late night, mess, cleanup till 0300 ;-)

How do the pro's sweeten up their stuff ?

Cheers

BeerNut

The pro's don't make beer from sachets. You're quite limited with what you can do with kits as most of the decisions have been taken for you. If you want full control over how your beer tastes, you need to be brewing all-grain. Enough lager malt, or even something fuller like Munich malt will give you that lovely biscuity pilsner sweetness.

Back to the kit: spraymalt is only about 75% fermentable so if you dropped all the sugar and replaced it with spraymalt it'll do less to boost your ABV and leave some residual sweetness behind.

Tube

To increase sweetness you need to get non-fermentable sugars in there. As you have discovered simple sugars are easily processed by the yeast and only end up being turned into alcohol+co2.

Lactose is non-fermentable, but I don't know if I'd add it to a lager. It tends to end up more in milk stouts. But I suppose you could try a teeny amount in a sample of you beer.

Also, some hops have a kind of a sweet flavour, which could be really what you're looking for.

What was the finishing gravity do you know?

madhatter76

@BeerNut: thanks for that...
I wanted to start with the kits to just learn the basics of what happens when playing with the additional ingredients. With the all-grain I plan to go ahead next year when I understand more of the basics.

I will try it with just Spraymalt and see the difference.


@Tube:
the OG was around 1060 for the described last one and I bottled at around 1015 after 2 weeks when it seemed nothing more was going to happen in the fermentation bucket.

In my next try I will work with the Spraymalt and try some hops and will see what difference it will make.

sharingan

I would have a look at hops that can add sweet flavours. You would need to boil them to get those flavour components, so google how to make a 'Hop Tea' if you are using kits.

To sweeten your beer, you need to be going all grain or partial grain. Blending specialty malts like what BeerNut suggested should do the trick, but some brewers will also extract their wort at higher temperatures to make more unfermentable sugars. But thats a bit of an advanced trick.

Tube

madhatter76 wrote: »

@Tube:
the OG was around 1060 for the described last one and I bottled at around 1015 after 2 weeks when it seemed nothing more was going to happen in the fermentation bucket.

1.015 is moderately sweet. This stops at about 1.015 and has a noticeable sweetness.

Ratsathome

I use "Canderel" to back sweeten my wine. Don't know what it will do to beer.

Khannie

Ratsathome wrote: »

I use "Canderel" to back sweeten my wine. Don't know what it will do to beer.

You shouldn't use Candarel unless you're doing it at drinking time. It's aspartame based and aspartame breaks down in alcohol within a few weeks. Splenda is better (or there is a sucralose candarel now which is the same as splenda) and cheapo saccharine based sweetener works too.

thecountkelly

I keg my beer and if I feel it needs to be sweetened I will add potassium sorbate to kill the yeast add the desired amount of sugar then force carbonate. I have only every done this with a cider, when I used champagne yeast (and was way to dry for my liking). It worked well enough tho. I suppose you could do the same with beer but kegging would be essential for carbonating.

joctcl

thecountkelly wrote: »

I keg my beer and if I feel it needs to be sweetened I will add potassium sorbate to kill the yeast add the desired amount of sugar then force carbonate. I have only every done this with a cider, when I used champagne yeast (and was way to dry for my liking). It worked well enough tho. I suppose you could do the same with beer but kegging would be essential for carbonating.

sorbitol is non fermentable and will backsweeten available from the homebrew shops, normally for cider or wine