Homemade candi syrup advice

[Woolsocks]

After scouring this forum and a few other places, here's my plan to make some homemade candi sugar and add it to my beer. Idea is to add 75# sugar to a 15bbl batch.

Making syrup:
Take 25# sugar in a turkey-fryer-type burner. Add 25mL 88% lactic acid. Heat while stirring until melted. Wait until it gets to desired color. Add 1-2 liters water. Pour into sanitized bucket or corny keg. Repeat twice more to use up all the sugar.

Adding to beer:
Brew beer. Let fermentation get rockin'. Put 25% of the syrup into a corny keg. Fill rest of corny keg with boiling water. Mix. Blow into fermenter from the bottom. Repeat until all syrup is in the beer.

Any advice, or am I doing this right?

[beertje46]

Why not just add it to the kettle as each batch of sugar is complete?

[Woolsocks]

Because then I have to pitch more yeast. Apparently when they see candi sugar they skip the lag phase.

[beertje46]

I've never experienced that. I used to brew a Dubbel with 88 lbs. of amber Belgian candi sugar added 20 min B4 EOB. I used a kick-ass Belgian ale yeast and pitched at a normal rate.

[jarviw]

What Woolsocks is talking about is "glucose shock".

Yeast preferentially eat glucose before start working on maltose. By providing too much glucose in the wort, yeast will get full on glucose but not prepared to ferment maltose, resulting low attenuating beer. In many sense it's a "wort quality" issue, but I think it may have a bit more to do with the yeast strain as well. (after all they found this glucose shock phenomenon from the lager breweries using too much corn syrup.)

But in any event, you should pitch enough yeast. if the extra 75# sugar is going to kick up 2 plato, add the extra 2 Million cells!

[beertje46]

I'm familiar with the concept of "glucose shock". What I said was I never experienced it. But, again I was using a rampant Belgian strain.