Shipwrecked - more way then one.

The third attempt to dissolve the sugar - still
visible in the bottom of the jar. The original
sugar was somewhat darker than this.

This post is going to be a quickie - I'm brewing while doing chores, so there isn't much time for me to write.

Its time for some summer beers, so on the docket today is a classical saison. Because I'm pressed for time I didn't formulate my own recipe, and instead I am brewing this the "Shipwrecked Sainson" from HBT. No changes were made to the recipe, other than I'm using cultured Dupont Saison yeast and I once again made my own candi sugar - this time amber instead of dark.

If you've followed my older posts on homemade candi sugar (Posts 1, 2) you'll know that the usual product of this process is a block of candi sugar. This time I tried to make a syrup by adding ~400ml of water (for 460g sugar) at the end of the process; but instead of a nice syrup I instead ended up with a jar of half syrup and half solid sugar - sugar which was almost impossible to re-dissolve. Instead of being a time saver, this has instead become a time-suck. It took a few rounds off adding boiling water and heating/scraping to get it all in the brew (picture to left).

Making the amber sugar was quite easy, and produced a product similar in flavour to pancake syrup, but without the butteriness. The process:

1. 400g of sugar was dissolved in water and inverted, as per my prior posts
2. After inversion the sugar was warmed to 135C and 15ml of 1M lye was added
3. Within 1 or 2 minutes colour/flavour development hit the desired level.
4. 400ml of water was added to make a syrup, which as mentioned above, failed miserably...

Anyways, that's all I have time to write today. I'll be sure to follow up with some tasting notes in a month or so.

Now, off to clean the truck...