Dextrose Brewing

[user 105168]

Would a brew where the only fermentable is dextrose work to make an alcoholic soda water for use in flavoured beverages?

Proper nutrition and healthy fermentation would be key in making this a tasteless as possible, with that in mind could it work or is a recipe like this a non-starter.

I've read a few other forum posts but the discussion was focused around sucrose and the conclusion was it wouldn't end up very nice. Let me know if I missed a post about the dextrose equivalent.

I was thinking of using champagne yeast and Fermaid O and trying to get 10-15% ABV. This could then be diluted with flavour syrups/sweeteners for a hopefully tasty beverage of 4-7%ABV.

 

[MHB]

It's been done, can work reasonably well within certain constraints.

If you take the alcohol over about 8% and certainly over 10% you will get quite a lot of flavours you don’t want.
Ferment as cool as you can, again to minimise ester production.
EC1118; the common Champagne yeast available in dry form would be a good choice as its 1/ very alcohol tolerant, 2/ a low flavour producer, 3/ has a wide temperature range.

Agree that a good healthy yeast pitch will help as may Fermaid. I would want to add a good yeast nutrient complex (yeast food -not just DAP).
Get off the yeast as soon as fermentation is complete (yes rack the brew). Add a decent dose of activated charcoal to adsorb (not absorb) to the second fermenter. Let it rest for a week or two and have a taste.
Mark

 

[TwoCrows]

 

[Pummers]

I did something similar to this a few weeks ago, I made a 4.5lt mix using White, Raw and Dark Brown sugar to see what colour and tase it would have. I killed off some old cider yeast with boiling water and used that as nutrient and used EC-1118 yeast. I think this was a bad idea.

It took longer than expected to brew out and then I got busy and left it sitting on the lees for about 2 weeks extra. So unfortunately it has ended up with a product thats about 10% with a shocking taste of ethanol, this might be fine to distill but that wasn't my final objective. So my first attempt was not the win I expected.

I might wait until it gets a bit colder so I can control temp a bit better and give it another go with 8-10kg of white sugar and turbo yeast and aim for 20 litres of 20% product and give it to a mate to process. I'd expect 8-9 litres of 40% final product.

In the mean time I might cold crash my original product and see if i can improve it, if not I might freeze it and pull off the unfroze spirit and save it until I can purify it.