Low Alchole HB

[HBAndy]

I am a Cooper's Draught, Real Ale, Dark and Larger brewer.  Nothing Fancy.  I usually only add 750gm of sugar,  not 1Kg.  It makes me stay on my stool longer, about 4.5%.  Question,  Can I go to 250gm without spoiling the recipe? I am aiming for 2.5% Cheers to all you Brewers

[Classic Brewing Co]

1 hour ago, HBAndy said:

I am a Cooper's Draught, Real Ale, Dark and Larger brewer.  Nothing Fancy.  I usually only add 750gm of sugar,  not 1Kg.  It makes me stay on my stool longer, about 4.5%.  Question,  Can I go to 250gm without spoiling the recipe? I am aiming for 2.5% Cheers to all you Brewers

Hi @HBAndy, welcome to the forum.

My immediate reaction is why are you using sugar as your fermentable? You can get better results with the Coopers Brew Enhancers 1,2 & 3 - all designed for different styles of beers.

I have never tried to make a low alcohol beer, but the average home brew is always going to fall in the 4.2-4.5% ABV area.

Sugar will definitely increase the ABV & usually you need a blend of Malts & other ingredients to achieve this, attached a chart.

The other thing is using sugar will make your beer thinner, usually resulting in poorer head retention.

[iBooz2]

1 hour ago, HBAndy said:

I am a Cooper's Draught, Real Ale, Dark and Larger brewer.  Nothing Fancy.  I usually only add 750gm of sugar,  not 1Kg.  It makes me stay on my stool longer, about 4.5%.  Question,  Can I go to 250gm without spoiling the recipe? I am aiming for 2.5% Cheers to all you Brewers

@HBAndy you will not arrive at a 2.5% ABV beer by using a kit can and 250 g of sugar (presumes in a 23 L batch).  If you want a 2.5 % ABV beer, then just use the kit can in 23 L and it will come it at about 2.6 % ABV in the bottle.  Only problem with this is, the bitterness will be too high (estimated IBU = 22.8 which is up around 1.0 BU:GU ratio i.e. bitterness units to gravity units).  A well-balanced beer like your typical commercial pub lager has a BU:GU ratio of 0.5.

My suggestion is to try the less bittered kit cans, say a lager or a draught kit can with just 500 g or 250 g of Coopers light dry malt first up (no sugar, just malt) and see how that goes.  It will be higher % ABV than you are after but it will give you a better beer than just using sugar.

Once you get better at it you could just use a tin of Coopers Liquid Malt Extract as the base (instead of a kit can) and then some hop additions, like a boil and then a hop steep to get to your low alcohol beer target with good BU:GU ratio of bitterness.

Edited February 5 by iBooz2

[ChairmanDrew]

2 hours ago, HBAndy said:

I am a Cooper's Draught, Real Ale, Dark and Larger brewer.  Nothing Fancy.  I usually only add 750gm of sugar,  not 1Kg.  It makes me stay on my stool longer, about 4.5%.  Question,  Can I go to 250gm without spoiling the recipe? I am aiming for 2.5% Cheers to all you Brewers

I challenge you to make this and report back with the results (you will be the first ) https://www.diybeer.com/au/recipe/zephyr-light.html

[Aussiekraut]

13 hours ago, HBAndy said:

I am a Cooper's Draught, Real Ale, Dark and Larger brewer.  Nothing Fancy.  I usually only add 750gm of sugar,  not 1Kg.  It makes me stay on my stool longer, about 4.5%.  Question,  Can I go to 250gm without spoiling the recipe? I am aiming for 2.5% Cheers to all you Brewers

Low alcohol brewing at home isn't an easy task and with a kit, it's even trickier. Kits are designed with three parameters in mind: The kit can, the "kilo" of additional fermentables and the 23l target. It is all designed around this. While you can usually add to it to your heart's content, taking away is a little trickier. If you use 250g sugar (why sugar???) you will get a thinner beer with less body. So you somehow need to "fill" the gap. Brewing all grain allows you to get around a few things by using different malts or higher mash temperatures but with kits, you don't have that luxury. What you can try is using just a small amount of dried malt extract and adding something like 250g of maltodextrin to the brew. Maltodextrin doesn't ferment, so there will be more residual sugar, which "pads" out the beer a little and adds body. Don't go bonkers with it, start at 250g and if needed work your way up but in the end, I wouldn't use more than half a kilo. Because it doesn't ferment, it won't bring alcohol up. 

But one more thing, do you use sugar or do you use sugar as a synonym for things like dextrose or brew enhancers? If you use sugar, ditch it. DME is a much better way to go and it aids the body of the beer too as it ferments less than sugar/dextrose. 

It'll take a bit of experimentation but you might just be able to get something decent with low ABV. However, 2.5% and decent taste probably won't work. I brew all grain and while I have managed to do a reasonable batch with 0.8% and one with 2.0%, it is a lot of mucking around and is a lengthy process. My best effort is a mid strength beer with about 2.8%, which has good body and nice flavours. It required pulling all the tricks up my sleeve to get there though. Commercial beers are usually brewed normally and have the alcohol extracted afterwards. We do not have that option as home brewers.

Welcome to the forum mate.