Sugar And Winemaking Will Always Be Together

Sugar when mixed with yeast, creates the miracle that is alcohol. See what kind of sugar you need to make delicious yummy wine at home.

1. What is it?

Sugar or Sucrose falls into the category of monosacchorides - the simplest form of carbohydrates. In precise culinary terms, sugar is a type of food associated win one of the prmary taste sensation, the taste of sweetness.

2. Purpose

Sugar serves as the 50% partner with yeast to make alcohol. When sugar is mixed with yeast the chemical reaction creates two new substances.

* CO2 or Carbon Dioxide
* Ethanol

Carbon Dioxide: Carbon Dioxide is a colorless gas with a faint, sharp odor and a sour taste when dissolved in water. Carbon Dioxide makes up about 0.03% of the air by volume. Plants need it to produce oxygen.

We also use Carbon Dioxide in many other ways in everyday life. Its used as a refrigerant, used in carbonation of soft drinks, in aerosol sprays, and most importantly as 'dry ice' in fire extinguishers.

Its great for putting out fire because of its light weight ( its lighter than air so it blankets a fire) and because it does not burn so it extinguishes a fire.

Carbon Dioxide can also be a bit of a nuisance. It contributes to the greenhouse effect, it can kill people if you are breathing it for a long time without oxygen - it can be fairly poisonous.

Carbon Dioxide is formed by burning things as in wood, plastics and fuel. This gas was found by Scottish chemist Joseph Black in the 1750s. It is denser than air and is soluble in water. It also stimulates breathing, so it is used in breathing apparatuses and anesthesia.

Ethanol: Also known as 'grain alcohol' is what is commonly found in alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, ciders, spritzers, and other liquors. It is basically another word for alcohol that is drinkable. Ethanol is a colorless liquid.

3. Which kind to use?

Their are five kinds of sugar, that are used for our food and drinking purposes:
1. Raw
2. Mill White
3. Blanco Directo
4. White Refined
5. Brown

Raw:
Sometimes prepared as loaves rather than as a crystalline (solid) powder: in this technique, sugar and molasses are poured together into molds and allowed to dry.

The resulting sugar cakes or loaves are called jaggery or gur in India, pingbian tong in China, and panela, panocha, pile, and piloncillo in various parts of Latin America.

Mill White:
Also called plantation white, crystal sugar, or superior sugar, is raw sugar whose colored impurities have not been removed, but rather bleached white by exposure to sulfur dioxide. This is the most common form of sugar in sugarcane growing areas, but does not store or ship well; after a few weeks, its impurities tend to promote discoloration and clumping.

Blanco Directo:
White sugar common in India and other south Asian countries. In producing blanco directo, many impurities are precipitated out of the cane juice by using phosphatation a treatment with phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide similar to the carbonatation technique used in beet sugar refining. In terms of sucrose purity, blanco directo is more pure than mill white, but less pure than white refined sugar.

White Refined:
White refined sugar is the most common form of sugar in North America and Europe. Refined sugar can be made by dissolving raw sugar and purifying it with a phosphoric acid method similar to that used for blanco directo, a carbonatation process involving calcium hydroxide and carbon dioxide, or by various filtration strategies.

It is then further decolorized by filtration through a bed of activated carbon or bone char depending on where the processing takes place.

Beet sugar refineries produce refined white sugar directly without an intermediate raw stage. White refined sugar is typically sold as granulated sugar, which has been dried to prevent clumping.

The type of sugar you need is the white refined (Granulated) powdered sugar.

4. Where to get it?

To get white refined (Granulated) powdered sugar, you can get this from your local grocery or convenience store.

I recommend you buy as much sugar as you can at once. As sugar is cheap and easy to store and the more you buy at once the less you pay in the long run.

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Comments

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 at 5:46 AM, by Manjoor
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