Brewers Caramel Flavour?

[Randai]

So I've been reading through Bronzed Brews (book by AHB Member Korev) and the shut up about barlcay perkins blog and a stack load of recipes come with Brewers Caramel to up the colour.

Now I've seen mention to
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com.au/2009/07/barclay-perkins-1936-kkkk-water.html

That they get the temperature up high.

Also in the recipe it says "if smells burnt" throw it away.
http://www.unholymess.com/blog/beer-brewing-info/making-brewers-caramel

I tried making it, it go fairly dark brown but no burned/bitter flavour and it appears it was far too light in colour to noticably colour my beer I made with it. Just wondering if I should do another crack and put that in the fermenter to give it a bit more flavour to it.

But I am not entirely sure what I am aiming for here. Does brewers caramel add in any bitter/burnt flavour to the beers that it gets used in? or is it purely colouring? I mean burnt/near burned caramel definitely has some sort of bitter flavour going on.
Should I aim for more a burnt runny sugar opposed to a dark brown sugary taste? Anyone else got any input?

 

[tugger]

I came across this while making a cola product.
I scabbed a few hundred ml to try in my beer.
It may be what your looking for.
You can turn an ipa into a black ipa or any colour In between and only adds a little bit of bitter roast.

I have not tried making my own.

 

[manticle]

My understanding of the product used commercially is that it is entirely used for colour adjustment. Not sure about barclay perkins version - he does have recipes for various invert syrups - presumably this is different.

 

[Randai]

Cheers tugger, I had seen that before. But I didn't know that it added a bit of bitter roast flavour.

Manticle, yeah I think this is different more like a caramel that has gone too far.

I actually tried another batch tonight and went further this time and it did go extremely black and slightly burnt smelling. But not entirely unpleasant, with a bitter flavour to the black sugar. It did seem to colour water a lot better than previously.

Though in the water I couldn't pick up any of the "burnt" flavour. So maybe its all just for colour, but I guess there has to be some "flavour" there, though whether its a distinguishable amount or not, not sure.