Sugaz 101
Beer is traditionally made from malted barley, hops, water and yeast. However there are three brewing "traditions" that have substituted fermentables other than malted barley and they have done this for a number of reasons:
USA - their traditional six row barley is very high protein and in order to "tame" the beast and produce clear beers without hazes, for about the last 150 years they have used a high proportion of other unmalted grains in their mainstream beers, mostly maize and rice (Bud for example have big rice farms in Louisiana). Despite the growth of craft brewing, most American, Mexican, Canadian and South American beers are produced this way - some even put in potato starch. And why not I say B) However apart from some West Indies breweries, the use of sugar itself is not widespread.
Britain - the introduction of artificial fertilisers in the 19th century resulted in bumper crops of barley but again they started hitting haze problems. Also the Malt laws were changed in the (1880s??) so maize etc was no longer taxed as malt, but regarded as a sugar so tax free. So brewers even until recently would add a fair whack of maize and / or sugar, as Britain was at the centre of world sugar trade and owned most of the production, especially from the West Indies etc. This came in handy during the two World Wars as brewing malt was in very short supply so they bunged in even more sugaz. However it's interesting to see that nowadays a lot of the better brands such as Fullers and Timothy Taylor have gone back to all malt, due to the breeding of low protein modern malts and also the fact that the ingredients cost isn't such a huge component nowadays. Most of the cost of beer is in energy, plant, paying the forklift driver etc.
Australia - Up to 30% of the fermentables in beers such as VB comes from cane sugar for a few reasons fairly unique to Australia. Until the 1960s the six o'clock swill meant that a million thirsty workers would descend on the bars at 5 pm every day and drink themselves legless. The beer had to be cold, light in body and easy to chug down and massive use of sugar enabled them to turn out a light swilling piss. Also barley malt production has always been a bit unreliable due to droughts and floods, of course. So having another fairly reliable fermentable was invaluable. Plus the fact that the barley is grown inland, but the major breweries were on the coast, where sugar is grown. Many a now vanished local brewery was established in - or within easy rail shipping distance of - sugar country (Steindls of Maryborough, the old brewery at Maclean NSW, Macs at Rocky )
In all those traditions, it's been possible to sneak in sugars and other adjuncts - not always as a cost cutting exercise - and still produce a popular and drinkable beer. If you poison of choice is Carlton Draught, mate it would just taste plain
wrong if they did it as all malt.
However whilst 30% is probably as high as you would want to go, I've always felt that the use of a kilo of sugar to a beer kit is not only
dead wrong but also IMHO is mostly what gives home brew a cheap and nasty reputation, that and poor temp control or yeast choice.
In my kits days I almost invariably used BE2 and found with the lighter coloured kits that it produced a beer not unlike the mainstreams such as Carlton, which was what I was aiming for at the time, without being too thin or "twangy" as compared to the kilo of cane sugar version. In my "historical" UK beers made on grain I often put in a couple of hundred grams of sugar, or half a kilo of maize, as I'm aiming more for the sort of beer I would sup back in the 1970s.
