Beer Forum

Has anyone had success making their own candi sugar? I am going to give it a shot this weekend and was looking for any advice?

I made some candi sugar a month ago. It turned out really well.

Check out
http://www.franklinbrew.org/brewinfo/candi_sugar.html
You can find plenty more information online. I just put some sugar in a sauce pan and heated it on medium, stirring constantly. It melts into a syrup and you keep stirring until it reaches the color you want. Then you pour it on a sheet of aluminum foil to cool or add water to thin it out into a syrup. If you add water be very careful. It is very hot and the water will cause it to boil over.

Check out p 168 of Brew Like a Monk, to paraphrase from Randy Mosher's comments, "Start with a bottle of plain corn syrup in a heavy saucepan, and add to it 9 grams of ammonium bicarbonate,... , stir to dissolve. Cook over medium high heat. In several minutes the sugar will darken. You can sample as you go, by removing a drop now and then and cooling it on aluminium foil, and tasting it when it is WELL COOLED. When the desired color and flavor is reached, remove the pan from the heat and CAREFULLY add cold water to create a thick syrup, which will be easy to add to your kettle. This process creates a class IV caramel, which is stable in beer pH and alcohol levels."

brewranger wrote:Has anyone had success making their own candi sugar? I am going to give it a shot this weekend and was looking for any advice?

i wouldn't recommend the mosher method. vastly different from the high quality syrups you can buy.
the stove top caramelized sugar method works pretty well for the elusive #3 sugar used in English beers though.

made some yesterday and was pleased with it.

went with...
1lb white sugar
3/4 cup water
3/4 tsp of lemon juice

boiled for 70 min to get a good dark color.

I followed the directions from hopwild. http://hopwild.com/2009/04/07/make-your ... ndi-syrup/

alan_marks wrote:Check out p 168 of Brew Like a Monk, to paraphrase from Randy Mosher's comments, "Start with a bottle of plain corn syrup in a heavy saucepan, and add to it 9 grams of ammonium bicarbonate,... , stir to dissolve. Cook over medium high heat. In several minutes the sugar will darken. You can sample as you go, by removing a drop now and then and cooling it on aluminium foil, and tasting it when it is WELL COOLED. When the desired color and flavor is reached, remove the pan from the heat and CAREFULLY add cold water to create a thick syrup, which will be easy to add to your kettle. This process creates a class IV caramel, which is stable in beer pH and alcohol levels."

Every bottle I've seen had vanilla added.

Supposedly Dark Candi makes their syrup in a vacuum which must have something to do with their elusive flavors.
I've made some very tasty syrups using this info: http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/sugarguidelines.pdf but they're not quite as rich as the Dark Candi.
I'm wondering if I can (safely) create some kind of vacuum situation on the stove top. Also just got a big pressure cooker, maybe the syrups would come out differently cooked that way?

I'm guessing that the low pressure is just to lower the balling temps.


also, i was told that belgians use beet sugar for candi sugar.