Residual Sugars in beer?

I'm not sure taste buds will give you the whole story though. The amount and flavor of hops can sometimes mask residual sugars, as well as high alcohol content. A lot of IPAs have a higher FG than a Scottish ale, which will probably taste more malty.

Left Hand's Milk Stout is probably drier than most imperial / double stouts.

 

Some breweries post up their OG and FG numbers

I was under the impression that the closer to 1.000 the beer is, it's shows it has the least amount of sugar left in your beer.

Ie. Some pilsners and Sours and saisons finish close to 1.004 range. I've seen ipas at 1.010 and as high as 1.022 with the same amount of ABV. Super big stouts can finish as high as 1.030.

That's generally my gauge. One place may have a IPA at 1.008, and my own perception is that it's drier than another finishing at 1.016

 

I think that's generally true, but other ingredients in a beer can cause the FG to be higher, thus giving the impression there is more sugar than is actually there.

 

@TEKNISHE
Most of the topics have been covered...especially the increasing usage of lactose sugar in IPA/DIPA and the famous "milkshake" beers (a la Tired Hands).

A density meter will measure just that...the sugar density of the wort (regardless of whether or not the sugar is fermentable by brewer's yeast). Therefore, if the OG is only listed on the packaging, it is inconclusive. You need to have both OG and FG metrics in order to determine how much unfermentable sugar is left in the beer.

That said, with SOOOOO many breweries opening up and releasing product...it is the Wild West out there. The TTB does not have the resources to screen every brewery. I would like to think that breweries are doing their best to "hit their numbers," but it is possible that a few a getting away with selling product that is not to published spec.

 

Some dry beers have gotten below 1.000 - I know Jester King has produced one. I think some super-malty beers like Black Tuesday and who knows what else have finished at 1.040 or HIGHER. Any super high ABV beer (like Avery Uncle Jacobs, Tweak, etc) is likely going to have a higher FG. If I ever get a sample of ST Crème Brule I'll throw it at the hydrometer and see what happens.

 

Brewers yeast will ferment out the simple sugars first. Then Maltose, which is about half of the wort. Then some go after maltotrios (some don’t ferment this), dextrins are not fermented.

Alcohol is less dense than water, so a highly attenuated beverage can be less tha 1.000 (cider often finishes less than 1.000 as it is mainly simple sugars to start with).

Some beers with crystal malts and roast malts will have higher sugar that don’t ferment out, and the extract from roast malts is for the most part not fermentable, which is why those bid stouts have high final gravitates.

One other thing, those really big beers may have some sugar that normally would get fermented, but the yeast may hit its alcohol tolerance and give up, somewhere over 10%.

 

Yea I mean I'd definitely agree with that, but in lieu of being able to measure carbohydrate content by mass spectrometry I'll stand by my assertation that taste is probably the best metric available. Definitely not an end all be all thing but most beers, as far as I'm aware, don't provide nutrition labels either.

 

If you can take a gravity reading of room temp, decarbed beer (you'll need about 1 ounce) you can use a cheap hydrometer to get the FG reading. From there, using the published ABV you can use online calculators to determine very closely the OG; you can also get the calories within about 10% margin of error.

No Mass Spectrometer needed.

 

Oh, so simple!

I have a feeling the average beer drinker can't or won't do all that to figure out the carb content of their beer. Do you really think the OP is going to take measurements of their beer and hop online and do calculations to figure out how much carbs are in his beer, every time he cracks a new one?

Once again just to reiterate I'm not at all saying that taste is a super absolute method. I'm a biochemist, I get your point. I'm just trying to be realistic here within a tangible framework.

 

Won't name names but I know a few places who push out some of their beer in as early as 10 days. At a certain point, those last few .01-.05 drops aren't worth losing money over. So in some sense, the beer is unfinished. To them, their house yeast is a beast, and its' getting the job done for the most part. I've had far too many incomplete, overly sweet yeasty sort of beers not named NE IPA. That's why that style gets a bad rep. People were mistakenly making those before it was cool. But thats for another thread.

Also, your senses and palate aren't wrong. I sense extra sugars all the time. It usually correlates to higher ABV. But there are cases, like for me with Sam Adams beers. 90% of their beers taste overly sweet (even their 5.4% beers). In that case, it feels like some drier 7% ipas are less sugary than some 5.4% ales, and they are probably are

 

Offhand I would think the lower the ABV the lower the residual sugar. Maybe it's time you learned to love session beers or a really nice pilsner

 

Steer clear of Dark Lord, its FG is around 1.060, higher than most 6% abv beers.

 

Good lord. One of my homebrew mistakes finished at 1.060 and it tasted like hersheys syrup.

 

Finally got my hands on one, I'll report back.

 

Well, you can always just hold out until Piel's is (finally?) resurrected, since everyone* knows that Piels has less NFS...


* Perhaps "everyone" is an exaggeration?

 

I wonder if the types of sugars not consumed by the yeast are those which cause problems to diabetics.I know a few diabetics who are quite heavy beer drinkers.

 

I find this situation to be pretty neat. Most S. cerevisiae strains will preferentially ferment glucose until the glucose is gone from solution and only then will they use other carbon sources. Some microbes, like Pediococcus sp., have the capacity to repress this genetic imperative in other microbes like yeast so that they will ferment all sugars at the same time, leaving more glucose for other microbes in solution. The phenomenon, in case you wondered, is termed Glucose Repression.

Would agree on the crystal malt bit, but not about the roasted malt. The extract in roasted malts are reduced commensurately with how highly kilned they are causing less fermentable sugar to be able to be derived from them. Many "normal gravity" stouts attenuate just as well as their pale counterparts, even though they have roasted malts in them. Most of the time, big stouts have high terminal gravities because of the amount of unfermentable sugar in solution plus the yeast strain chosen to ferment them, not from the roasted malts in their grainbill.

 

JK, do you have any details on what 'type' of beer the resurrected Piels will be? Will it be an AAL beer like the 1960's Piels beer? Will be be a Bavarian type lager beer of circa 1890?

Cheers!

 

AAL, I imagine. (He's even using the Stroh era label from the 1980s). The guy who owns the brand is a descendant of Thomas P. Hawkes, who didn't become president of Piel Bros. until after the company was taken over and became a division of Drewrys in 1962 (which evolved into the Associated Brewing Co., after another merger, also known for other brands like Schmidt (of MN), Pfeiffer, Sterling and Mickey's Malt Liquor).

So it's not as if he has a connection to the history of the brewery with the that stretched back to the pre-Pro era when it was still Piel family run and known as one of the most authentic "German" breweries in NYC.

 

I suppose we will learn more when/if this beer becomes available for sale.

Have you any idea of this beer's intended distribution area?

Cheers!