In Case You Want to Put M&M’s In Your HomeBrew Recipe

Besides just Plain vs. Peanut, you’ll probably want to know how the sugar in them will affect your specific gravity.  Like if you add 3 pounds – is that too many? Is one pound good enough to reach your target gravity?

Oh, and if you made the Belgian candi syrup from last week – this works for that too.  And pretty much any other kind of sugar you want to add to your recipe.

So First, Some Beer Nerd Stuff

Home Brewers generally measure the sugar extract potential of an ingredient in “points per pound per gallon”. Meaning the number of gravity points that a potential sugar will give when one pound of it is dissolved in one gallon of water.

When you’re talking about a starch based ingredient – like malted barley grains – this is assuming the all of the starches have been converted to sugar (usually by enzymes in the mash).  For sugar-based ingredients, it’s just like it sounds:

Dissolve one pound of sugar adjunct in one gallon of water and measure the resulting gravity. Then you can divide that number by the batch size (for example 5 gallons) to determine how many gravity points you will get from adding one pound of the sugar to the recipe.

Most barley malts are in the 1.035-1.038 range.  Basic cane sugar is about 46 PPPG (1.046).

So doing the math for 5 gallons of wort, 46/5 = 9.2 or about .009 additional gravity points from adding 1 pound of sugar to your recipe.

Ok, You Can Start Reading Again

So we can use this new-found knowledge to figure out the gravity of the candi sugar we just made?  Yep.  And why do we need to do this?  If you’re using plain sugar you probably don’t – I just told you how many points you will get out of it.

But for the syrup we made, there is quite a bit of water added and depending on how thick you made it (the commercial stuff is actually pretty thin) the potential gravity will vary.

We’re basically going to make a small batch of wort – except we’re only going to use the 1 sugar we want to measure.  Its sort of wasteful to use a whole pound of the stuff just to check the gravity though.  Let’s scale the experiment down a bit.  Enough to fill your hydrometer sample tube will do nicely.

Warning:  There will probably be some metric measurements used here. It just makes more sense (to me anyway) when working with small amounts like this.

Step 1. Measure the volume of your hydrometer sample tube (if its not labeled).  Just fill it with water and then pour the water into a measuring cup.  Mine is 200ml.  This is a pretty round number.  If you insist on working with US measurements that’s 6.76 fluid ounces, or .85 cups, or .21 quarts…

FYI – Beersmith will convert volumes for you!  If you like doing things the hard way, then you can also use Google. Just search for “convert 200ml to ounces” and it will show up at the top of the results.

Step 2. Figure out what percentage of 1 gallon your hydrometer sample tube holds.  Again, just use brewing software or Google.  200 ml is .05 gallons (5%).

Step 3. Apply that percentage to figure out how much of your 1 pound of sugar to use.  In this case 5% of 1 pound is .80 ounces by weight (…) – or 22 grams (see, much easier).

Step 4. Break out the same scale that you use to measure out hops and weigh out that much of your sugar (or syrup) adjunct.

Step 5. Combine your water and sugar in a small pot and briefly bring to a boil.  Just long enough to dissolve – you don’t want to boil off too much of the water.

Step 6. When your sample has cooled some, put it back into your hydrometer sample tube along with your hydrometer.  Either wait for it to cool all the way to 60ºF, or do the conversion for reading gravity at higher temperatures.

The commercial syrups are labeled at 1.032 PPPG – so if yours is of similar consistency then the gravity should be pretty close.  I had one syrup measure out at 1.033 and another that was considerably thicker at 1.042.

Pretty simple right?  Now you’re all set to amaze your friends with all of the wacky stuff you can add to your home brew.  Skittle-beer, here we come!

Tagged as: belgian candi syrup, measure sugar gravity, points per pound per gallon, potential extract