DIY: Belgian Candi

At some point during home brewing, a home brewer would like to do something special, like brew a big beer, or make a sour beer or even age some beers. And I wanted to do the first of them, which is to brew a big beer.

To make big beers, your yeast should have a higher-than-normal amount of sugars to chew through. These levels of sugars in the wort can come from the base malt itself or you can add sugars like dextrose, maltose, cane sugar or even jiggery as I have done so in the past. One other option is to add Belgian Candi to your wort. The use of Belgians using Belgian Candi is debated: some say they do, some say they don’t.

While I wont take sides on whether Belgians use Belgian Candi or not, I could not find a single place in Bangalore where Belgian Candi could be purchased. Some browsing around on the internet told me that you can make Belgian Candi at home.

Why make Belgian Candi for big beers when you can add any sugars since Belgian Candi is a sugar too?

Belgian Candi is inverted sugar. When you heat cane sugar, you invert the sugar (sucrose, which is made up of simpler sugars - fructose and glucose attached together), which means that the heat breaks down sucrose into individual molecules of fructose and glucose. This makes it easier for the yeast to process these simple sugars and increase the gravity of the beer.

And so with an eye brewing big beers in future, I decided to make Belgian Candi at home. All you need is cane sugar, which is easily available, water, a heat source and some citric acid. You can purchase citric acid from the bakery section of a supermarket or like me you can add the juice of one lemon to 300 grams of sugar.

Usually, 300 grams of sugar will yield around the same amount of Belgian Candi. Add enough water to the sugar to make it syrupy, add the juice of one lemon and bring the mixture to a boil. It is important to maintain the temperature between 126°C and 135°C. With time, water will boil off and you need to add water to maintain temperature in this range. As you hold this temperature range, you will start to see the sugar going from a pale, pale yellow to orange to red to deep ruby and then darker shades.

You can decide on what color your Candi should be and raise the temperature to 149°C when you hit that color. Immediately take it off the heat and pour it in a pan. I used aluminium foil to line the pan and then I left the pan to cool. 

And voila: you have Belgian Candi.

On the boil, 300 grams of sugar, enough water to make it syrupy and the juice of one lemon.

The mixture has started to boil and will change color as the water boils off.

There is a faint yellow shade, but you may not be able to figure that from the camera shot.

The Candi has reached the color I wanted and I'm just about to take it off the boil.

I poured the Candi syrup on a sheet of aluminium foil and left it to cool.

Once cooled, I cracked the Candi and dusted it with powdered sugar and put it in the refrigerator.

I had some extra time to play around with the process so I decided to have another go at making Belgian Candi, but this time vary the results with the boil time and here are my results:

Various shades of Belgian Candi