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Has anyone ever added just plain sugar to the secondary to up the ABV?
None of the following information is my own, it is merely my experience and interpretation of what I have read and experienced. I may be completely off base on this (I don't think so), take it as you wish or not.bonjour said:Sucrose, aka table sugar, is completely fermentable. Once inside the yeast cell it is broken down into glucose, but it is 100% fermentable providing other nutrients are present.
Fred
Look a little farther and you will see that the "unaccounted for" carbon molecules are in CO2Wastegate said:Sucrose (disaccharide or C12, H12,O11) aka table sugar, is fermentable after the yeast brakes it down into fermentable sugars aka fructose (C2, H12, O6) and glucose (C6, H12, O6) (monosaccharides). To say it is completely fermentable I believe is not a correct statement, there are still four carbon molecules unaccounted for and it is missing one oxygen.
This is not my experience. 6% boost from adding 22% sucrose and I don't believe I have that sweet smell you are referring to.Wastegate said:It is speculated that the one oxygen molecule is to be pulled directly from the beer as it ferments. Given enough time the yeast will break the sucrose into fermenable sugars, time being the key factor. This is why you get a sweet smell to beer when enough is added (No more than 15%). From my experience the yeast does not have enough time and falls out of the beer before is has completely fermented the sucrose out. Which is why I stated that there is lots of sucrose that they yeast can not turn into alcohol. I did not state that it would not convert at all, merely that there is a large amount that still remains. I also stated that sucrose wont do much. This was in reference to ABV. In my experience I have only been able to raise the ABV an average of 1 to 1.5 points by adding either Candi sugar or Table sugar.
I could see that that this could be possible/plausible. Given the yeast uses up most if not all the O2 during the early stages of fermentation it could be using the unused C4 as fuel to create CO2. I would hazard a guess this could be partially true because CO2 is a byproduct of the alcohol production and it needs to get the two oxygen molecules from somewhere. But at this point this is purely conjecture on my part. Looks like more research is in store! I will pass this on to my chemical engineer friends and see what they say. Of course I will have to bribe them with some HB for their time.bonjour said:Look a little farther and you will see that the "unaccounted for" carbon molecules are in CO2
I could see that the smell may go way depending on the Flocculation and attenuation of the yeast. Like I said I will have to try this on a HEFE to see how it turns out.bonjour said:This is not my experience. 6% boost from adding 22% sucrose and I don't believe I have that sweet smell you are referring to.