Sugars in Homebrew Mead, Wine and Cider - Gravity Measurements

I have notes so you know this must be important and it is we get questions all the time by people asking on our Channel and our VIP everywhere how do I know how much sugar to add how do I know how much honey how do I know how much of this can I use brown sugar can I use muscovado extruder can I use turbin Auto share what about molasses you know what every one of those things is a perfectly fine thing to use in your Brew to add to the fermentables the things that make things ferment and create alcohol but they all have a little bit of a difference in how they work and it confuses people now one caveat to this I do realize that as you add more sugars or honey or whatever into the same volume you are in fact changing that volume like if you had you know enough to make one gallon with one pound and then you added two pounds of sugar yes it is a little bit more volume and it does change things this is a Rough Guide okay just Rough Guide great to get you started don't trust this 100 but it gets you going it gives you an idea there's your caveat now let's get started okay the first thing I want to discuss is one of the things that we use a lot and a lot of people ask about is juices now juices have a range okay in general a juice is going to be 0.040 to 0.065 gravity plain and simple depends on the juice you have to check there's no other way to know the next most common thing used for fermentation is plain old white table sugar that generally gives a .046 gravity per pound of sugar in a gallon of must now that doesn't mean a gallon of water and a pound of sugar it literally means add your sugar fill water to a gallon in there that should be about 1.046 you're probably wondering where I got the one from let me explain that the .046 is the sugar itself the 1.000 is actually the water because water has a neutral density it's 1.000 so that 0.046 is adding to the neutral density of water making it 1.046 so all the numbers I'm going to talk about from here forward are adding to the neutral density of water where the juices it's really 1.040 to 1.065 okay because it is more dense than water so I sort of misspoke when I said it that way just go with me here a lot of people ask if brown sugar and muscovado sugar turbidado sugar are different than plain white sugar and everything that I've researched says no they're not now I'm calling it .046 many people say 0.045 for sugars that one point one one thousandth of a point really doesn't make that much difference okay just to be honest with you it really doesn't matter so 46 45 either way you're good but again that would be 1.046 in a gallon for one pound next on the list is corn sugar also known as dextrose that's actually a little bit lower it's .042 per pound in a gallon we can just say PPG per pound per gallon that's the easiest way to do that and it's kind of a commonly accepted term so we're going to say it that way next on the list is honey now honey does have a little bit of a range depending on the manufacturer and where you got it from how long they let it sit but they do have certain requirements in order for it to be honey and to be kind of stable in general honey is about .035 people say PPG I call it gravity but really it's PPG .035 per pound per gallon another common one that people ask about is molasses now while I don't actually prefer the taste of fermented molasses it is actually much like honey for its PPG rating it's .035 just like honey but it does have a range still maple syrup very common lots of people like to ferment maple syrup and it's similar to honey but not necessarily now we're talking about real maple syrup here not the high fructose corn syrup pancake syrup stuff we're talking about real actual maple syrup there is a variance I've heard as low as 0.025 but that's kind of rare usually it's .030 to about .035 that seems to be the general range you may just want to test yours to be sure and then something that we've used on the show is date syrup and that one works a lot like maple syrup it has quite a bit of variance it's thicker than maple syrup which is strange but there's less sugars in it and that's usually about .030 to 0.035 the one we used I believe it came to like .032 but they do actually have a little bit of variance some other things that you might want to try fermenting with that have sugars in them are fruits now when you start adding fruits you have to work a little bit in theory because here's the thing like berries for instance a whole pound of berries might only add six or eight points of gravity to your must it really doesn't add that much whereas like um grapes can be higher depending on the type of grape so fruit you really need to do the research use a little Google Foo that means going on Google and looking it up and find out what is the amount of sugars that they have per pound and it's very very simple let me let me give an example let's say I go on the internet and I'm using a fruit whatever the fruit happens to be and I know that if I put a pound of this fruit in it's going to be 250 or so 270 or so grams of sugars in that pound that's about half a pound of sugars right so if I know that white sugar because that's what we're comparing it to white sugar at that point if I know the white sugar is 0.046 and I used half of that I know it's going to give me 0.023 so it's actually pretty simple even when you're using whole fruits and things like that to kind of get a rough idea of about how much it's going to add so every once in a while we'll get someone that you know oh I put in a pound of strawberries because I wanted to make wine okay a pound of strawberries in a gallon is really only going to give you like six to eight points so it's like a 1.006 or 1.008 whereas a pound of peaches let's say is going to be much much higher than that every fruit is a little bit different best to look it up and find out I've yet to see one fruit that really did have half a pound of sugars in a pound I just they don't really do that going back to that caveat for just a moment as you add more volume of these sugars you have less volume of water therefore you are in fact changing that Gravity by more as you add more of each ingredient so that's why I say this is a guideline one two three pounds it's not changing it that much five to ten points once you start adding a lot more like four or five six pounds which isn't really recommended in a gallon anyway that's when it significantly changes the concentration levels and would totally throw off all of these guidelines completely but that's the gist of sugars in your bruise now remember if you're doing one pound in one gallon that means if you're going to make five gallons you need five pounds most things scale up pretty easily like I always say to scale up your brew from one gallon to three gallons or five gallons multiplied by however many number of gallons you're making and just double the yeast if we only used half a packet or use a full packet of yeast for three gallons and five gallons you're good to go hopefully this helped if you guys have any questions or if there's a sugar that I might not have touched on because I tried to find the most common ones but I'm sure there's more out there ask away in the comments I'll be sure to help you out and let you know what I find in the meantime though thanks so much for watching and have a great day

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 14,863

Keywords: gravity of sugar in homebrew, how much sugar to add, specific gravity, specific gravity calculation, gravity of sugar, gravity of honey, gravity of brown sugar, ppg, what is ppg, how to measure specific gravity

Id: eSRgJCSRjwY

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022