One lump or two?

It has been suggested that there was room in BOTW for a little more technical stuff. So pay attention, here comes the science bit: Daniel Cooper reports on the use of sugar in brewing.

Yeast ferments sugar to produce alcohol – that is the basic biochemical process that our ancestors harnessed to produce our favourite alcoholic beverage. But there’s much more to it than that...

The sugar that the yeast requires to produce alcohol in beer is typically derived from a cereal source, usually malted barley, and the brewing process has evolved to facilitate the conversion of cereal starch into sugar. But for many brewers fermentable material can also come from cane or beet sugar in addition to barley malt. However, in some circles, sugar is given short shrift as it is wrongly perceived as just a cheap form of fermentable material.

The truth is that some of the characteristic flavours that we associate with many of the world’s greatest beers owe a lot to the use of sugar.

It is thought that the pleasant sweetness of sugar was first discovered by the indigenous people of Polynesia around 20,000 BC. However, it was not until much later, in India, that the first crude sugar was produced by extracting the sweet juice from sugar cane. In 510 BC the Emperor Darius, of what was then Persia, invaded India where he found “the reed which gives honey without the intervention of bees.” When the Arabs invaded Persia in 642 AD they learnt how sugar was made and, as their expansion continued, established sugar production in other lands that they conquered, including North Africa and Spain.

Sugar was introduced to Western Europe as a result of the Crusades in the 11th century .....

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By Derek Cooper

Section : Beer Production

Page number : 30