How to increase the alcohol percentage of beer
Today we are going to talk about a topic that is simple and at the same time quite interesting. Someone asked how you can increase the beer alcohol percentage and how you can make beers have more body. We will dedicate this post to that topic.
If you want to increase the alcohol percentage of the beer, you can use different techniques depending on what you want to achieve, and the first is add more malt For example, if you have a recipe that is going to give you up to, let's say, a 5% alcohol percentage of the beer - and you add 10% more malt, then they would have approximately 10% more sugars and then 10% more ethanol potential.
If you want to increase the alcohol percentage of the beer, different techniques can be used depending on what you want to achieve.
It depends on the yeast that can attenuate it, that is, convert those sugars in ethanol so that you reach that final alcohol, that is, the resulting alcohol. So it is also important to use a yeast that has good attenuation. Hay levaduras de baja atenuación que producen poco etanol.
Most of the yeasts They are medium attenuation and there are some specialized high attenuation yeasts that I also do not recommend looking for very high attenuation yeasts, because it will make us Leaving the beer with that dry feeling will leave it very alcoholic and not very sweet.. So a medium dim.
Yeast is always going to be a good idea, if you add more malt, because you can increase your potential alcohol percentage and ideally have a higher final alcohol, of course, which is fine, because it implies greater cost to the recipe and elevates the whole. The flavor doesn't increase, the alcohol increases.
About yeast, read the following post: THE BEER MAKING PROCESS (PART 2): YEAST
Other techniques to increase beer alcohol percentage
Now there are other techniques to increase the alcohol percentage of beer. You can add fermentable sugars, sugars such as glucose or dextrose, which is the corn sugar. So if you add dextrose, espresso is a very fermentable sugar, a monosaccharide. While with glucose you will increase ethanol. You should not add it in quantity, because if you have beer with too little malt and too much sugar, the yeast will only consume glucose, and then it will not want to metabolize the malts like that.
If it is an "inverted sugar or Belgian caramel syrup", which is table sugar in this case, sucrose is made up of glucose and a fructose and inverts it. They separate it into glucose and fructose, and they do this by heating and adding a little citric acid. You can do it at home.
There are other techniques to increase the alcohol percentage of beer. You can add fermentable sugars, sugars like glucose or dextrose, which is corn sugar.
If you are going to do it, simply caramelize the water with the sugar. It can be put in a large frying pan. You can add the lemon drops to catalyze the citric acid reaction. It is heated and, due to the effect of the heat and with the help of citric acid, the sugar will separate glucose and fructose.
Then that sugar can be left to cool and then it will form into a candy like a lollipop and then that candy is added to your beers. It is a method that is used in Belgian beers, but you can add dextrose, which is corn sugar, or you can also add sucrose without inverting.
The invertase enzyme and the alcohol percentage of beer
The yeast has an enzyme called invertase, and then the yeast applies and separates the sugar into its two compounds, which is, on the one hand, a glucose molecule and, on the other hand, a fructose, and can then metabolize them later in the cell. And you can increase the alcohol percentage, you can add any fermentable sugar.
"Invertase is an enzyme widely used as a substitute for yeast in baking and animal feed. The most common use of invertase in sugary foods is based on the slow and partial transformation of sucrose into invert sugar (glucose + fructose). Fructose has more sweetening power, more humectant power, more solubility and therefore less tendency to crystallize and harden. In this way, it acts as a softening agent in foods. sugary foods with a tendency to crystallize sucrose and evaporate water. This affects their appearance and consistency.".
Honey to increase the percentage of alcohol in beer
To increase the percentage of alcohol in beer, you can add, for example, honey. Although honey is always very slow to ferment, you can add piloncillo or panela, as it is called in some other regions of Latin America, or you can add molasses, brown sugar, any sugar you want, or, for example, agave honey. All of these compounds have fermentable sugars and can add a slight hint of flavor to your beer and will ultimately raise the ethanol level.
Higher percentage of alcohol in beer, some examples.
They can also add malt extract to increase the alcohol percentage of beer. This is a good option if you don't want to sacrifice flavor. Malt extract linearly increases the flavor and body of the beer.
You may be interested in this video about the percentage of alcohol in beer: