Schweeet!

If you're going to make Belgian-style beers, you will doubtless encounter references to Belgian Candi Sugar.

Unfortunately, and like so much in the world of writings on home/craft/micro brewing, several people don't know what Belgian candi sugar is.

It isn't something you can make at home, unless you live on a farm that grows sugar beet and have a sugar refinery of your very own. It isn't something you buy in rock-form that someone lovingly crystallised using bits of string over several days or weeks. It isn't invert sugar, or sucrose broken down to fructose and glucose.

It is (as I've just hinted at) all the tasty 'impurities' that are left after you've refined beet sugar.

We don't grow as much sugar beet as we used to in Australia, having moved to sugar cane quite some time ago (but you can find out more about what used to be a significant industry if you get yourself to the Maffra Sugar Beet Museum, or just click here -> http://www.maffra.net.au/heritage/musmaf.htm).

My first Belgian-style beer used dark brown sugar. Like molasses or some of the wiggy sugar slabs you can buy from an Asian grocery, it's very tasty. Quite reasonably priced and very, very easy.

My second such beer used table sugar I broke apart using heat and citric acid. Very inexpensive and fun.

My third will use some actual Belgian Candi Sugar I bought. Stupidly expensive. Just arrives in an ExpressPost satchel, which counts as fun for some people.

I've been laughed at for buying the Belgian Candi Sugar. I've been laughed at for worse. But at least I am being a little bit authentic about it. Time will tell if it is worth the expense...

Get Thee Behind Me, Syphon!

Ever since my first foray into partial-mash brewing (a very short-lived exercise before I discovered the natural beauty of all-grain), I have been trying to find the perfect syphon to get the hot wort out of my boiler.

Up-ending the boiler into the fermenter or No-Chill Cube is no good. I want to keep as much of the trub out of the fermenter as possible and also avoid the dreaded Hot Side Aeration. The former is a taste and clarity issue and the latter is claimed to reduce the beer's longevity as a drinkable thing.

I thought I had found the solution with Fermtech's 'Easy Syphon' (or perhaps Auto Syphon - they seem to have a naming/branding issue), but near-boiling wort is a natural enemy of plastic and this too soon proved to be less than perfect.

Eventually, I got sick of the whole caper and decided to bore a hole in the side of my 75 litre FBBoiler. I settled on a hole of about 20 mm diameter, which was too big for my biggest drill bit but too small for my smallest hole-saw. This, dear reader, is why we have Dremels. A short half-hour or so of noisy Dremelling and I had a somewhat messy, but perfectly functional hole in the side of my boiler.

Having done this, something had to be done to bring the boiler back to usefulness. Two trips to Bunnings, one to the local Mitre-10 and one to Grain and Grape later, I settled on a nickel-plated brass ball valve and some ancillary plumbing bits.

It looks like this:

From Beer Equipments

Unless you're on the inside of the boiler, in which case it looks like this:

From Beer Equipments

The yellow washer is actually a silicon O-ring I compressed the bejesus out of when I tightened the whole thing up.

Now I just have to test it all out with a brew...