Brewing with dextrose (corn sugar)

did you shake (oxygenate the fermenter)? what was your boil time and OG?

 

The fermentation should erase all of your problems.

 

Once the fermentation gets started you should see a lot of churning thru the glass wall of your carboy. That churning will mix everything.

 

The difference between malt extract and pure sugar is the sugar is going to ferment completely. You're probably going to end up with a pretty high ABV when all is said and done. I have no idea how that much sugar is going to effect flavor and mouthfeel.

 

Sugar itself will not effect the flavor, assuming it all ferments out, but the increase in alcohol from 4 pounds of sugar vs. 3lbs of DME will. I can imagine it will be quite 'hot' and the malt flavor will be subdued behind the alcohol and hops. The alcohol, with only 3lbs of DME, will give you a pretty low (dry) final gravity.

I brewed a hard root beer with a base that used 3lbs of DME with 2lbs of corn sugar and a pound of rice syrup solids and it dropped to 1.001. Very dry and very flavorless (which was my goal). Not what you would want for an IPA, really.

 

Too much corn sugar subbing and your body suffers. Your fermentation may be more prone to generating fusel alcohols, too.

 

I would expect a beer with little body, lots of alcohol and some cidery flavors.

When n too much corn sugar is used in place of DME or LME- you get a cidery kind of flavor going on.

Let us know how it turns out.

 

Yeast have been fermenting sugars for a long time. Don't worry, they'll find them.

 

You used way too much sugar for any style of beer. An IPA can use 0%-10% sugar. Some Belgian styles use 20%-30% sugar. I'm not aware of any style that uses 60% dextrose.

It's possible you might like the end result, but this won't be your best beer.

 

That would be the IPH - India Prison Hooch

 

What yeast did you use? What temperature did you pitch at? What temp is the room at where the beer is?

 

You have to mix after you add top off water. Otherwise, as you've seen, you'll end up with stratification. It's happened to me. Next time mix it so it's all even before you pitch. I don't think this has to do with the sugar, just the not mixing.

 

I did the exact same 4 lbs corn sugar + 3 lbs DME on 2 IPA batches years ago...the end results was not that good. My wife will drink any IPA and she refused to drink it because it was way too sweet. Even though corn sugar completely ferments out, it still leaves a residual sweetness that reminds me of a bad adjunct lager...kind of like how a mead still has the characteristics of honey even though it all ferments out. It took me forever to drink those batches and now I never go over 1lb in a bigger beer to dry it out or 8 oz in a typical 6% IPA. I'm sure your beer will get going if you did things right.

Unless you did this as a partial mash, 3 lbs DME + 4 lbs corn sugar doesn't come close to an OG of 1.080-1.090 for a 5 gallon batch. You can use an online calculator like this one... http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator/ ... to calculate expected brew stats. When you used your hydrometer to measure that 1.080-1.090, there was a lack of mixing of the wort that gave you an off OG.

 

I don't know where the sweetness came from, but assuming fermentation didn't poop out, it wasn't from anything residual (left over) from the corn sugar. Corn sugar is nothing but dextrose (glucose), plus a small amount of water. Yeast turn all of the glucose ultimately into alcohol and CO2. The reason mead tastes like honey is that honey does not completely ferment. Only the sugars in honey do. The hundreds of other compounds in honey don't.

 

Don't worry about bubbles in the airlock, it is possible that CO2 is leaking out from around the stopper. Since you did not pitch too hot, you definitely have live yeast in the beer, it just is taking time to get going. RDWHAH

 

Another thought... I wonder if the higher concentration of dextrose vs. maltose led to higher ester formation, which could have been perceived as sweetness.