Category: sweeteners

The Bitter Pill: Dehydrated Angostura Bitters Tablets

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I wanted to find some more uses for the dehydrated liqueurs I spent a few months developing. The index to that experimentation is here.

Yesterday I tried putting dehydrated liqueurs into pill capsules, but these did not readily dissolve in any of the drinks I put them in.

So I went online and bought a pill press. You'll find them online often called a "pollen press" to make some sort of pollen pills (and I get the impression that they're also used in vaporizers with marijuana). Anyway, the one I bought was this simple split pipe and sleeve on Ebay. I bought the half-inch size.

You simply put some powder in the sleeve and the metal pipes into either end, then bang them together using a rubber or wooden hammer. It produces a tablet of sorts that you can make in any thickness.

So now they're ready to use. One of the first ones I made was not the Campari or other typical liqueurs, but Angostura bitters. (I mixed Angostura and sugar and dehydrated them together in the oven.)

That way, this "bitter pill" of Angostura and sugar can be added to bourbon to make an instant Old Fashioned cocktail.

It can also be added to champagne to make a Champagne Cocktail.

April 17, 2012
A Brilliant Idea That Didn’t Quite Work

You'll remember I spent a few months figuring out the best way to dehydrate liqueurs into flavored sugars.

Now I'm finding new ways to use those liqueur-flavored sugars.

Typically bartenders who use these dehydrated liqueurs sprinkle some on top of an egg white foam or use them as a rimming sugar on a cocktail glass. But I had the idea to use them as an optional flavor enhancer to cocktails – give the customer a drink and some powdered liqueur and let them add it if desired. (Some bars do this with bitters and tinctures.)

So I bought some vegetarian capsules and filled them with dehydrated liqueurs.

They look awesome, right?

But unfortunately, they didn't perform as expected. When adding them to a cocktail the capsules didn't dissolve. I tried a boozy cocktail, a fizzy cocktail, and an acidic cocktail in the hopes that these would help speed up the process. I even tried a hot cocktail to see if that worked.

In all forms, the capsules dissolved eventually, but if you want to wait 20+ minutes for that to happen you're a more patient drinker than I.

Ah well, it was a cool idea that didn't work out.

But in tomorrow's post, I'll talk about a technique that actually worked…

Read more about the Solid Liquids Project and how to deyhydrate liqueurs here.

April 16, 2012
Sugar Production in Modern Times

In the Sugar Spirit Project we've looked at the history of sugarcane and sugar production (project index here).

In this post we'll look at sugar production today. Some of this information may be out of date due to the date of my reference books/websites, so please take it all with a grain of salt.

Nowadays, sugar is not longer a major export in the Caribbean except for Guyana, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

In India, the sugar industry is not large plantation-based but from small peasant holdings. The cane is processed by private companies or cooperatives. This is because citizens were already occupying the land and couldn’t be forced off when sugar cane was planted.

In China sugar is not an item of mass consumption. It is also not a plantation culture.

In Cuba, after Fidel Castro’s revolution, they increased minimum wage for cane cutters, and expropriated sugar plantations and mills. Keep in mind US interests controlled much of the sugar cane production in Cuba. So the US retaliated by importing sugar from elsewhere. 82% of Cuban sugar was exported to the US so it was a major economic problem. Eventually they sold it to Eastern European countries.

But communist employment didn’t inspire the hard labor required to cut sugar, so the harvests did poorly. Eventually the harvest was militarized. Then when the Soviet Union crumbled so too did 85% of their sugar exports. Half of its 156 sugar mills closed and 60% of its fields were converted to vegetable farms or cattle fields.

Brazil is today’s largest sugarcane producer. In the 1970s due to oil shortages, sugar cane was processed into fuel as well as sugar.

The world's biggest sugarcane producers in order are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Pakistan, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, Argentina, and the Philippines. Half of the supply comes from Brazil and India.

The sugar industry in Brazil employs over 1 million Brazilians and is more than 10% of the country’s agriculture. Gas there is required to contain at least 25% ethanol. About half of sugarcane grown is converted into ethanol; most of the rest is exported.

It takes 3 days to transform sugarcane into ethanol.

In the US, corn yields a ratio of 1.3 units of energy produced vs. expended to produce it. Beet sugar yields 8.3. Yet corn is cheaper to grow so it is grown instead.

Per hectare (2.47 acres) sugar cane yields about 20 tons of dry material, half of which is in sugar of some form; the other half is bagasse – trash for fuel, etc.

Four U.S. states produce sugar cane:Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Texas. Sugar beet farms can be found in California, Colorado, Idaho,Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota,Oregon, and Wyoming.

According to Sugar.org, we now use more of other sweeteners (I'm guessing high fructose corn syrup) than sugar from cane and beets. "Sugar remains the predominate sweetener in every country except the United States, where in recent decades man-made sweetening agents have been created and mass produced."

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

September 26, 2011
Sugarcane and the Environment

For the most part rum is made from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production. So when we study the issue of the environmental impact of sugarcane production we need to keep in mind that molasses is the waste product of sugar production. Rum is recycling!

That said, we're studying not just sugar but sugarcane production so let's look at its impact. Most of this information comes from Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (2008). See the references page for more information.

In Cuba where they couldn’t purchase pesticides and fertilizers due to economic issues, they made their own version of organic sugar farming.

Sugar beets are a rotational crop so they don’t need much fertilizer or pesticide. It doesn’t cause much erosion or contamination.

The sugar industry ruined the Everglades. It was protected by President Harry Truman, but sugar planters drained it and plantations' phosphorous runoff hurt much of the topsoil.

Abbott writes about sugar's impact: “The World Wildlife Fun reports, cane has likely ‘caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop, due to its destruction of habitat to make way for plantations, its intensive use of water for irrigation, its heavy use of agricultural chemicals, and the polluted waste-water than is routinely discharged in the sugar production process.’”

On the other hand, “Although Brazilian cane production is notoriously destructive to the environment, cane-derived fuel is precisely the opposite. It is much cleaner than fossil fuels and contains no contaminants such as sulfur dioxide. It emits much less carbon dioxide and protects the climate by vastly reducing carbon emissions, hence reducing pollution. It is sustainable. It yield 8.3 ties as much energy as as that expended to make it and, as new cane varieties are developed, will yield even more. Even its by-products are valuable, and Brazilian mills process them into electricity for their own use and to sell to the national grid…. Cane-based ethanol is the Twenty-First Century’s miracle-in-waiting.”

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

September 19, 2011
The Sugar Spirit Project: Enter the Sugar Beet

In studying sugar and sugarcane (go here for the project index) we need to study the sugar beet; sugarcane's competitor.

Here we'll look at the sugar beet's early history.

Sugar beets were not economically important as a source of sucrose until the mid-1800s.

In 1774 a German scientist discovered the sugar from beets was the same as from cane.

Napoleon, due to the economic and real war with England, bet big on sugar beets. In 1811 he supported vast increase in sugar beet production. Within 2 years they built 334 factories and produced 35,000 tons of sugar.

To process sugar beets, they are sliced, dried, drenched with alcohol (I know the feeling some nights), heated to boiling, and filtered. Then crystals formed after several weeks. But this technology was later refined.

By the end of 1800s sugar beets were planted in North America. Sugar beets best regions to grow in the US are part of California extending east to Michigan, and in Canada from British Columbia to Ontario.

The Mormons tried to grow sugar beets as part of their independence movement, but they failed to produce any crystallized sugar with it. There were many other successes and failures trying to grow sugar beet in US.

By 1902 41 factories produced over 2 million tons of sugar from beets. by 1915, there 79 factories in operation, partly due to high war prices.

The first American farm workers’ union strike was over sugar beets in 1903 at the American Beet Company in Oxnard, California. It employed 1000 Mexicans and Japanese, who went on strike basically against the white workers who formed organizations to keep the wages of the others low.

During the Great Depression, sugar beet harvesting provided lots of jobs.

After Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps: actually sugar beet farms in Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, and Manitoba, to work the fields.

Later we'll look at sugar beet production in recent times.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

September 12, 2011
Sugar in Early American History

In studying sugarcane and sugar, we've looked at its biology, origins, spread to the West, association with forced labor, how it was processed in the olden days, and how the English developed a taste for it. (Go here for the project index.)

Now we'll look at sugar in America. Again I have used these resources for my facts and understanding of history, as I'm certainly no expert and I welcome your comments.

Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607. Sugarcane was brought there by 1619, but the colonists couldn't make it grow.

As it was a new country, the United States started their sugar production late in the game versus the forces of England, France, and Portugal. However they had their own sugar islands in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and The Philippines.

Around the time of the US Civil War, we got half our sugar from Cuba and half from Louisianna. After the American Civil War (that ended slavery), Cuban slave owners wanted to end slavery but wanted to be compensated from Spain for each slave freed. Spain refused, and this lead to the Ten Years War. This didn’t end up freeing Cuba (that was 1898) from Spain but it did end slavery in Cuba in 1886.

After this, the US imported 82 percent of all Cuban sugar, so sugar interests in Cuba became controlled by American interests. Eventually 2/3 of Cuban sugar was controlled by American interests.

In the US, it was sugar producers fleeing the Haitian revolution who made Louisiana’s sugar plantations profitable.

In Hawaii as land leases were granted to grow sugarcane, native Hawaiians were displaced. Irrigation for sugarcane cultivation diverted streams from their land, so many younger Hawaiians immigrated to California.

The US marines, acting for the sugar interests, deposed Queen Lili’uokalani. Hawaii was annexed to the US mostly so that the sugar planters could have free access to the US market.

At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Miss Louisiana was carved from a five-foot sugar lump. Jell-O created new fans. Fairy Floss, aka cotton candy, was also introduced.

In the 1800s in the US, grocery stores had portable mills to grind lumps of muscovado sugar into granules.

In 1858 the Mason Jar was invented and canning took off. Canning required white sugar, increasing the demand for it.

The ice cream craze also increased demand for sugar through mid-1800s.

Milton Hershey, the chocolate guy, built a factory town named for himself. Then in 1916 he duplicated it in Cuba and bought more than 100,000 acres of sugarcane and built the world’s largest refinery.

Now sugar is challenged by high-fructose corn syrup, which is cheaper to produce and transport. In the US (as of the writing of my source book) it takes only 1.4 minutes of work to buy a pound of sugar.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

September 7, 2011
Primitive Sugar Production

In studying sugarcane and sugar, we've looked at its biology, origins, spread to the West, and its previous nefarious association with forced labor. (Go here for the project index.)

In today's post we'll look at how sugarcane was processed in the olden days to make cyrstallized sugar. Most of this information comes from the sources cited here.

Sugarcane is first harvested. This was (and still is in many parts of the world) done by hand. First the cane fields are burned to remove excess vegetation and to kill off things like rodents and snakes, then it is cut. I believe that when using modern machines to harvest cane they don't need to burn the fields first.

Then the watery juice must be extracted from the cane. A while back I purchased a stick of cane and tried to get the juice out myself. It was a pretty massive failure.

Sugar cane is chopped, pressed, pounded, or soaked to remove the liquid from it. I don't know how the soaking method might work though – anybody have an idea? I am guessing the fibers are shredded and it is washed with lots of water to get the sugar to separate from the fibers. Tequila (post-baking) is shredded and washed to release its sugars so perhaps that's what my book meant by 'soaking.'

Anyway, then the sugary liquid is heated. This removes water and concentrates the sucrose that eventually becomes supersaturated in the solution. (This is the opposite of adding sugar to water. At first the crystals dissappear into solution until it can't hold any more, then crystals will no longer go into solution. In sugar production, they take an un-saturated sugar/water liquid and remove the water until it becomes saturated.) Crystals then begin to appear in the liquid and then must be separated out.

The hot crystal-containing liquid was then poured into conical containers with a hole at the pointy part on the bottom. As it cooled, the solid sugar would stick to the sides and the liquid molasses would drip out the bottom. What was left was a solid cone of sugar.

White sugar was preferred to (and more expensive than) the brown stuff that forms naturally. One method to create a whiter product was to put wet clay on top of the cone. Water would drip from the clay through the cone and wash it. This was called "clayed" sugar and was one of many categories used to describe the quality of the sugar, along with muscovado, refined, and double-refined. Sugars from different regions were considered superior to others: Brazilian sugar was once considered inferior to sugar from Jamaica and Barbados, for example.

The liquid that remains at the end of the process is molasses. It still contains sucrose but not enough to crystalize. But as we know, it can still be fermented and distilled into rum…

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

September 1, 2011
Sugarcane and Slavery

Boy is this ever a topic I'd rather avoid! However there is no denying the historic link between sugarcane production.

We were tracing the spread of sugarcane and the sugar industry from the Old World to the new. But slave labor used to harvest and process sugarcane began long before sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean.

Before sugarcane made its way to the Atlantic islands off the coast of Spain and Portugal, slave labor was used in Crete, Cyprus, and Morocco. Warfare and plague had diminished the local labor force so slaves were 'needed' to harvest it.

Slavery and sugar remained tied for a very long time, most notably so in the New World. 11 million African slaves were exported from their homelands. Six million of them went to work making sugar- the most of any profession. When the Haitian Revolution occurred near 1800, ending slavery there, it cut off 43 percent of Europe’s sugar supply.

One cool note: female slaves were often the distillers of rum in the islands.

Abolition

(Anti-Saccharites parody cartoon.)

The abolition movement in England linked sugar to slavery, and encouraged people to boycott sugar. The movement was largely lead by women, who purchased the sugar for the home. They were known as anti-saccharites.

1807 the British House of Commons made the slave trade- but not slavery- illegal. It wasn't until the 1830s before it was by British law.

The Emancipation Proclamation that finally freed the American slaves took effect in 1865.

After the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1884, all Caribbean sugar was made by non-forced labor.

Sugar After Slavery

After slavery ended, new labor was needed to harvest sugar cane, as many former slaves weren't about to take it up again.

Laborers came from many places, but especially from China and India. They worked as indentured servants, paying off their ride to the new island for several years. Indentured workers were called coolies.

This and other policies kept former slaves from buying land and becoming economically equal to whites.

After 1869, Trinidad granted small parcels of land to people who completed their indenturship. They bought up 23,000 acres between 1885 and 1895.

On Mauritius, nearly half a million Indian workers imported between 1834 and 1910. At one point they produced 9.4 percent of the worlds sugar supply, mostly providing it to Britain.

Though it was far from smooth sailing, eventually things worked out. According to Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott:

“Mauritius is an anomaly in the colonized sugar world. Its minorities, Creole and white, have accepted its Indianness- at 68 percent of the population, it has the largest concentration of Indian outside India- and a succession of Indo-Mauritian leaders have governed. An elite minority speaks English, the country’s official language, while everyone else speaks French-derived Creole. Hindu and Muslim holidays are observed, and since 1877, the Mauitian currency has been its rupee. Mauritius’s unique circumstances and the dynamics of its society have enabled its people to unite in racial harmony. Ironically, they have embraced sugar as their common denominator.”

In Hawaii, the indentured laborers were Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino. Chinese workers were later banned from immigrating because the powers that be felt there were too many who stuck around after their indenture time expired.

What fascinates me about the post-slavery indentured servant era of sugar production is the racial and cultural makeup of Caribbean islands that results from it. There are interesting mixes of whites, blacks, and Asian/Indian populations that vary depending on the island. The cross-cultural pollination over many years has lead to some fascinating local customs, celebrations, and cuisines that we think of as unique local island traditions when we visit on vacation. You go to Martinique and it's all very French and people drink champagne on the beach. You go to Trinidad and eat roti and other Indian food for every meal. As it turns out, those traditions developed due to the unique mix of people from diverse parts of the world, united under a shared history of sugarcane.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 23, 2011
The Spread of Sugarcane in the New World

When we last left off looking at sugarcane's spread from India/Indonesia to the rest of the world, the sugar industry had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal, including Madeira and the Canary islands.

During this time, the powers in Europe were developing a taste for sugar.

Sugar was only known in Europe after the 8th century. This is about the time that references to growing cane in the Mediterranean appear. Molasses reached England by late 1200s, coming from Sicily.

King Henry III (in the 13th century) ordered three pounds of sugar “if so much is to be had,” as it was rare luxury item.

But by 1319 one Venetian trader carried 100,000 pounds of it to London. The sweet tooth for sugar developed fast.

Starting in 1470, European countries radically changed how sugar was produced. They imported crude sugar and refined it locally. This changed the power dynamic – refineries had power and profits – and plays into how the sugar colonies in the New World were treated.

Sugar's Voyage to the New World

Columbus carried sugarcane from the Canary islands to New World on his second voyage to Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1493. However they were more concerned with finding gold than farming, so the sugarcane failed.

Later they brought in experts from the Canary Islands to help get it established. It was first grown in the new world in Santo Domingo (though it failed a few times first) and was first shipped back to Europe in 1516.

Portugal soon got into the sugarcane farming business as well. Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon Portugal by 1526 in large quantities. The Portuguese ruled the 1500s in terms of sugarcane dominance.

In early 1500s, Spain conquered the Mexican mainland, and used the Caribbean islands more as protected harbors along shipping routes than as sugar growing islands. From 1580 to 1650 (when the English and French got into the game on smaller islands) the Caribbean didn’t produce all that much sugar for export.

In 1625 Brazil was still supplying nearly all of Europe with sugar, but when English colonies got into full swing they drove Portugal out of the Northern European trade areas.

Until the mid-1600s, the British navy drink was "beer sometimes supplanted by brandy." Then the British started making rum. Barbados was settled in 1627 and sugar was grown there. Then after the 1655 British conquest of Jamaica, they started replacing the brandy ration with Jamaican rum. (Rum is distilled from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production.)

In 1731 rum became part of the official ration all the way up until Black Tot Day in 1970. Navy rum didn't just provide tasty nutrients, it killed bacteria in the drinking water.

Though the Portuguese, Spanish, and British were growing sugarcane, French prices were the best in Europe. Unable to compete, England just supplied its own needs from its islands, keeping pace with increasing demands.

As we touched on before sugarcane was even grown in the New World, England eventually forbade colonies from refining their own sugar. This kept the sugar colonies“infantilized and dependent.” Europe kept all the control, kept wealthy landowners in power in the colonies. The sugar colonies were to be used, not respected.

In the early 1600s, the British, Dutch and French all established Caribbean plantations. Years later in the 1800s, Cuba and Brazil were the major producers. Between these eras, sugar production increased as people got a taste for it. The technology to grow and refine sugar didn't change much in this era, but consumer demand did.

In the next post we'll look at sugar production and the labor used to do the work.

*Bonus fun fact* The West India Docks in Jamaica had gang members with the best names: The River Pirates, Night Plunderers, Heavy Horsemen, Scuffle-Hunters, and Mud Larks.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 22, 2011
The Spread of Sugarcane in the Old World

In the last post we looked at what sugarcane is. Now we'll see where it came from and how it traveled around the world.

Sugarcane is a tall grass native to the region of the India and Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated in New Guinea, perhaps independently in Indonesia.

In 325 BC Alexander the Great’s general Nearchus said, “A reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit.”

Around the same time, sugar was referred to as khanda, from which we probably derive the word candy.

In China there are references to sugar in 286 BC. Sugar spread with Buddhism and the Buddha was even referred to as the “King of Sugarcane.”

Sugar loaves were probably first produced in India 2000 years ago. Sugar loaves are hardened in ceramic molds or cones from which the more liquid molasses was drained, leaving behind the dark-brown, crystalline loaf.

Dioscorides (circa 40—90 AD) wrote, “There is a kind of concentrated honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is. It is good for the belly and the stomach being dissolved in water and so drank, helping the pained bladder and the reins.” This shows he was familiar with the crystalline form of sugar.

Sugar making in Egypt probably came before Arab conquest. The Arabs were experts at irrigation and used their skills to grow sugarcane and spread it to new places. Arabs spread it to the Mediterranean, Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, and Spain.

During the First Crusade (1096-99) Christians discovered Arab cane farms. Soon they were growing and transferring sugar cane to new locations.

From the Canary Islands it traveled to the New World. We'll pick up sugar's spread to the West in the next post.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 16, 2011