Category: sweeteners
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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…
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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.…
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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 Some of this information may be out of date due to the date of my reference books/websites, so please take it all with a grain of salt.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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…