Why your homebrew tastes cidery, and what the sugar did

Why a kit beer comes out tasting cidery

You follow the kit instructions, you keep the temperature about as steady as a shed will let you, and the beer still comes out with a thin apple-ish twang at the back of it that nobody actually wants in a lager. It's one of the most common things people bring back to the counter, and it's usually not the kit's fault at all, because more often than not the culprit is the bag of plain white sugar that went in alongside it.

The short version is that table sugar is sucrose and dextrose is glucose, and your yeast treats the two of them a bit differently. Sucrose has to be split before the yeast can use it, and a ferment that's working hard in the heat tends to throw more of those fruity esters while it's doing that, which is the apple note you're tasting. Dextrose goes straight in and ferments out cleanly, leaving basically nothing behind, so what you're left with is the malt and the hops rather than the sugar.

What the sugar is actually doing in the tin

A kit tin is concentrated wort, so it brings the malt and the bitterness with it, and it's deliberately short on fermentable sugar because shipping water around the country is expensive. Whatever goes in alongside it has two jobs to do at once, and this is the bit that catches people out. It sets how much alcohol you finish with, and it sets how much body is left in the glass.

Plain sugar adds the alcohol and takes the body away with it, so you end up with a beer that's strong enough and still tastes thin. Coopers Dextrose does the same job without the off notes, and a malt based enhancer does it while putting some body back in. I've written the full comparison of the three out properly in Coopers Dextrose or Brew Enhancer, which sugar your kit wants, so start there if you're standing in front of the shelf trying to pick one.

If the batch is already in the bottle

Time helps more than anything else does. Those esters soften off a fair bit over 4 to 6 weeks in the bottle, so a cidery young beer is often a perfectly decent beer that just got opened too early, and I'd give it a month in a cool cupboard before writing it off. What you can't fix afterwards is a ferment that ran hot, so the real repair happens on the next batch rather than this one.

For the next one, keep the fermenter somewhere between 18 and 22 degrees for an ale, which usually means moving it off the concrete and out of the western side of the shed rather than buying anything. Swap the white sugar for dextrose at the same weight. Those two changes between them sort out most of it.

The same rule in a sugar wash

Dextrose does the heavy lifting in a spirit wash as well, and for the same reason. A wash built on plain sugar tends to stress the yeast and go cloudy and sulphury on you, and every bit of that has to be dealt with later on, whereas a clean ferment gives you far less to chase. Most turbo yeast instructions are written around 6 to 8kg of dextrose in 25 litres, so the sachet you're using will tell you the number it wants.

Worth saying plainly, because a shop that sells the gear ought to: owning a still is lawful in Australia, and actually distilling spirits at home needs an excise manufacturer licence from the ATO. Flavouring a purchased base spirit with an essence is a different activity and doesn't need one, and neither does beer or cider.

Shop related products

• Coopers Dextrose 1kg. Pure dextrose, the straight swap for white sugar in a kit.
• Coopers Brew Enhancer 1. Dextrose blended with maltodextrin when you want a bit of body kept in.
• Coopers Brew Enhancer 2. More malt in the blend again, good under a fuller ale.
• Coopers Light Dry Malt 500g. All malt, for when you'd rather not use brewing sugar at all.

Did you know we also carry plain dextrose in 3kg, 5kg and 25kg in the shop, which is the sensible way to buy it if you're doing washes. Those bigger bags aren't on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf. There's more of the range at our Coopers collection and the homebrew collection.

If you'd rather talk it through than read about it, Brewhilder is our homebrew adviser and it'll walk you through a kit build, or you can just ask me in the shop.

Read next

• Why your lager tastes bready instead of crisp
• What a Coopers Brew Enhancer actually does to your beer
• How to set up a home brewing station on a budget

I still reach for the white sugar out of habit about once a year, and catch myself halfway to the fermenter.

Cheers,
Candeece

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