Adding More Sugar After Fermentation Has Started

[casualties_army40]

hey i put on a 23lt coopers dark ale can 7 days ago and i wanted it to be a bit stronger than normal. i read on a forum somewhere that towards the end of fermentation you slowly add more sugar for the yeast to eat and produce more alcohol. so i added 500g of destrose to it and i throft up heaps. im just wondering, beacuse i relatively new to homebrewing, if this is bad in any way? will it eventually go down? because its pretty much at the top of the barrel now. anyway cheers for any help people give.

 

[manticle]

It's fine. It will make your beer drier and possibly a bit thinner but it will increase abv and ferment out.

 

[Georgedgerton]

It certainly will produce more alcohol and I doubt you have caused too much grief, having said that I don't think that you would gain any advantage either and may risk introducing other unwanted side effects depending on how you added it.

 

[Supra-Jim]

I believe the theory of adding simple sugars later into fermentation is to ensure the yeast chomp their way through the more complex sugars first. Yeast can be lazy and simple sugars are like junk food, easy to digest but not overly beneficial. If the yeast get too much of a taste for the simple stuff, they can get lazy and ignore the more complex sugars, as these take more effort to process.


Cheers SJ