Lots of sugar

I'm sure I mentioned my trip to London this week. Yesterday, it was. These day trips are a bit of an endurance test. I'm still knackered.

I'll be busy for weeks combing through everything, but I thought I'd give you a random taste. As we were halfway through a conversation about sugar, that seems a good place to start. I photographed logs from quite a few new breweries and guess what? They all used sugar. Lots of different types.

Russells Gravesend Brewery did something I'd not seen before. Use cane sugar, invert sugar and glucose in the same brew. And, just for good measure, something called "tintose". I suppose that's a proprietary sugar. In case you're wondering, it's from 1929 and the beer is 6d Ale. Best Mild, you could call it. OG 1041.55. Sugar made up 14% of the grist.

Why sugar is inverted

I'd been hoping to find something like this. An explanation of why brewers used invert sugar rather than straight cane sugar:

"It is more usual to add sugars to the wort in which they are fermented together with the maltose of the malt. The sugars generally employed are cane sugar, invert sugar — which is most largely used — and glucose. Refined cane sugar has to be inverted by the yeast before fermentation, and to a certain extent weakens the yeast, favouring the production of lactic acid, so that it is preferable to invert the sugar first."
(Source: "Chemistry for engineers and manufacturers" by Bertram Blount, Arthur George Bloxam, 1896, pages 193-194.)