Homebrewing and Erythritol

[1Pet5_8]

Anyone tried Erythritol? It's an organic sugar alcohol sold in powder form as sugar substitute. It has (to me) virtually no bad aftertaste.

Been making hard cider, country wines, and meads with good success, so purchased some Erythritol as a non-fermentable sugar to "backsweeten" finished homebrews without kicking off further fermentation. It's become a very popular solution for homebrewers, along with many, many other non-fermentable sweeteners like Monkfruit, Stevia, Xylitol, etc. etc. But most of those taste gross, in my opinion. I thought I had found an amazing solution (pun intended).

The only caveat we read was that eating large amounts (around 50gr) can cause - shall we say, stomach and digestive issues - as it's not absorbed into the bloodstream. However I found that my body would not tolerate consuming any Erythritol beyond a small sample. I'm telling ya, it messed me up big time. Ran two separate tests to be sure. Now I'm sure LOL. The wife didn't have the same reaction at all. So much for my idea of using it in homebrews.

Anyone else have a similar experience? And did you find an alternative to it that worked for you?

 

[TexLaw]

I've not used, and I do not intend to.

I've always used maltodextrin if I wanted extra unfermentables in my wort. It may not be as sweet as some of the other things you mentioned, but I have no interest in sweet beer.

 

[1Pet5_8]

Thanks. Sweet beer is a bad idea, LOL! But sweet cider, wine and mead is a nice variety sometimes vs dry dry dry all the time.
Some folks do use maltodextrin as a thickener (mouth feel) for ciders but not specifically as a sweetener.

Still lots of traditional ways around the issue! Maybe if anything this post will help someone in the future to test an artificial sweetener on their GI system before dumping a bunch in a lovely finished brew haha.

 

[Old Hippie]

We use erythritol in a number of recipes. We do not use xylitol because it would poison Princess Flapdoodle the Operatic Dachshund if she were to get some. If I had to use an artificial sweetener (and didn't have the junior citizen around) I'd use xylitol because it blends in more easily than erythritol. We do not use stevia very much, as I don't like how it "sweetens" things. I can't really explain it clearly, but with sugar the sweetness goes "inside" whatever, while I always sense stevia as a "separate" sweetness that doesn't actually seem to sweeten the thing it's in. Xylitol's only downcheck for me is that it still has 40 per cent of the calories in sugar, while erythritol just goes straight on by with nary a glance.

Refined white sugar gets a bad rap sometimes, and for sure it can aggravate reactions in people who have certain dietary intolerances. Not just diabetes; histamine intolerance is much more common as well as SIBO. Raw sugar is still sugar, but without some of the problematic processing. Still sugar, though and all that comes with that. It's interesting that refined and raw cane sugar will get a reaction as will corn sugar used by a lot of brewers, while maple sugar (and syrup) do not cause many people to react.

My problem with erythritol is that it doesn't go into solution in liquid or sauce recipes and needs constant stirring. We made some rhubarb-ginger jam a couple years ago with it and the stuff crystallized once the solution cooled. Warming the jam puts it back in solution, but it recrystallizes as it cools. In baked goods it also crystallizes back out -- not too noticeable except for cookies get a lot harder, and of course there's the cooling effect of eating erythritol. Strange to eat a cookie that chills the mouth.

So, your gastric reaction aside, I'd say only to use erythritol in baked goods where its tendency to crystallize out won't be noticeable. I've used it in salad dressings and yeah, it's still crunchy. We use maple sugar to sweeten most things that both of us will eat, though raw sugar still shows up in small amounts where it works or in recipes that only the less sensitive of us will eat.

Traditionally, brewers used (or put up with to get other benefits) non-fermentables like maltodextrin. There are yeasts that can break down longer chain sugars such as Brettanomyces Bruxellensis, but they also tend by fermenting more of the sugars and dextrins to make the resulting beer taste thin, watery, with little body unless you account for that in the boil. Another one that most common yeasts will leave is lactose, used in the fermentation of so-called "milk stout."

One way to have more sweetness at the end of the ferment is to put a whack of it in at the front end. That will overwhelm the yeast, which will eventually struggle along and then go dormant leaving a lot of unfermented sugar. This I do not recommend, though I suspect most of us who brew have done it by accident a time or two.

One of the methods I use is to ferment to dead still and then prime. While many brewers prime with corn sugar I've preferred less simple sugars that take a bit of energy for the yeast to break down completely. The yeast being pretty well tired, it's not going to make a high lift to ferment complex saccharides and so a higher amount of residual sweetness will remain. With dark beers I like to use molasses to prime for the extra depth of flavour. That "cidery" taste you may get when priming with white sugar is the result of the yeast having to create invertase to break the glucose bonds.

With meads and cysers I typically gauge the amount of honey going in pretty carefully to finish at a nice dead still off-dry.

For cider I'll usually take what I get. I no longer have an apple grinder or press. Starting from ground apples is the best way, but grabbing some jugs of cider from the roadside stand works too. I have, since I live in a place with very few apples, even gone to the store and bought a flat of frozen apple juice concentrate, mixed it up double strength, and it made quite drinkable cider. If you do that, read the labels. There are concentrates chock full of awful stuff you don't want in your booze. For some reason frozen apple juice is now hard to find since the pandemic. Most of the time none of the stores near me have any.

Finally: alternatives. Maple sugar/maple syrup or honey both work though they also contribute their own flavours. Dry malt powder works very well also -- providing both fermentable and nonfermentable sugars. Fructose might also be a better choice than dextrose if you're looking for sweetness without added complications.

O.H.

 

[TexLaw]

Thanks. Sweet beer is a bad idea, LOL! But sweet cider, wine and mead is a nice variety sometimes vs dry dry dry all the time.
Some folks do use maltodextrin as a thickener (mouth feel) for ciders but not specifically as a sweetener.

Still lots of traditional ways around the issue! Maybe if anything this post will help someone in the future to test an artificial sweetener on their GI system before dumping a bunch in a lovely finished brew haha.

Your unfortunate distress brings up a point. Even if you and everyone in your house were fine with it, there's no telling who you might want to share your beer, cider, or mead with who could have a problem. That's reason enough for me to stay away from it. Even if I could drink it fine, I'd hate to be the guy who caused his friend to have a rough time!

When it comes to fermenting mead or cider, most folks I know monitor the SG and then hit it with potassium sorbate or potassium metabisulfate or something like that. Even if they need to backsweeten, they can use something that normally would be fermented. The sorbate/metabisulfate will prevent further fermentation.

Of course, some just make a mead with such a high OG that the yeast just up and quits.

 

[1Pet5_8]

Thanks for all the good points gentlemen

 

[ShaverAZ]

Gotta limit my sugar intake & decided that any of the sugar alcohols would be just the ticket. I scarfed down a quantitty of sugar-free chocolates. A couple of hours later & I got the EXTREME $hits. Water went straight thru me.
And THEN, after a couple more hours I got cramps - SUPER MEGA cramps. I thought I was going to die. The extreme intestinal pain persisted several more hours. I wasn't right for about a day.
So now I avoid all sugar alcohols like poison.