Tag: sugar

Making Sugar from Cane and Beets

In the continuing study of sugar, today we'll look at how sugar is made today.

According to Sugar.org, this is how sugar is made from either beets or cane.

For sugar cane:

❧ Grinding the cane to extract the juice;
❧ Boiling the juice until the syrup thickens and crystallizes;
❧ Spinning the crystals in a centrifuge to produce raw sugar;
❧ Shipping the raw sugar to a reﬁnery where it is,
❧ Washed and ﬁltered to remove remaining non-sugar ingredients and color; and
❧ Crystallized, dried and packaged.

Beet sugar processing is similar, but it is done in one continuous process without the raw sugar stage. The sugar beets are washed, sliced and soaked in hot water to separate the sugar-containing juice from the beet ﬁber. The sugar-laden juice is puriﬁed, ﬁltered, concentrated and dried in a series of steps similar to sugar cane processing.

The below illustration I took from the pamphlet on Sugar.org called "How Well Do You Know Sugar?" located at this link.

(Click for larger size pop-up. Image property of Sugar.org.)

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 27, 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
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
Solid Liquids: Cane Sugar, Fruit Sugar, and Honey
I hit a snag in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) as I can get some liqueurs to dehydrate into a powdered sugar, but not others.

In the last two posts, I think I've identified a commonality in the liqueurs that did not crystallize: they are probably sweetened with something other than (or possibly in addition to) cane/beet sugar.

I believe (but am not certain) that X Rated Fusion, Hypnotiq, and Courvoisier Rose are sweetened with fruit juice. Wild Turkey American Honey and Irish Mist are sweetened at least partially with honey. None of these crystallize when heated in the various methods used to make other liqueur powders.

So I decided that I had better learn about these various sweeteners.

Cane Sugar, Fruit Sugar, and Honey vs. Sucrose, Fructose, Glucose

I looked up these different types of sweeteners to see if they could provide insight into why it appears that cane sugar-sweetened liqueurs crystallize while fruit and honey-sweetened liqueurs have not.

Table sugar, which comes from either cane or from sugar beets, is sucrose. Fruit sugar is fructose. Honey gets its sweetness from the fructose and glucose. My first thought was that perhaps sucrose crystallizes readily and fructose does not.

However, sucrose (cane sugar) is also made up of glucose and fructose. And when you heat sucrose, it partially breaks down into glucose and fructose. A syrup of just glucose and fructose is called invert syrup.

Does that mean that there isn't much difference between cane sugar in its hot syrup form and honey or fruit-sugar sugar in its hot syrup form? Or perhaps it is the remaining sucrose in cane sugar syrup that allows for crystallization, while the other syrups have no sucrose so they don't crystallize?

Fructose, or fruit sugar, according to WikiPedia: "Pure, dry fructose is a very sweet, white, odorless, crystalline solid and is the most water-soluble of all the sugars. From plant sources, fructose is found in honey, tree and vine fruits, flowers, berries and most root vegetables… Commercially, fructose is usually derived from sugar cane, sugar beets and corn." Thus, there is definitely a way to get fructose to crystallize- can it be done with conventional oven methods? I need to research this further.

Glucose is sometimes called grape sugar. If what I understand is true, you don't find it just laying around. Wikipedia says, "Glucose is produced commercially via the enzymatic hydrolysis of starch. Many crops can be used as the source of starch. Maize, rice, wheat, cassava, corn husk and sago are all used in various parts of the world. In the United States, cornstarch (from maize) is used almost exclusively. Most commercial glucose occurs as a component of invert sugar, an approximately 1:1 mixture of glucose and fructose." I'm not sure that helps at all.

Crystallizing Honey

Returning to honey, we know it can crystallize as we see it around the neck of the jar. To find out how, I again turn to Wikipedia.

Fresh honey is a supersaturated liquid, containing more sugar than the water can typically dissolve at ambient temperatures. At room temperature, honey is a supercooled liquid, in which the glucose will precipitate into solid granules. This forms a semisolid solution of precipitated sugars in a solution of sugars and other ingredients. Since honey normally exists below its melting point, it is a supercooled liquid. At very low temperatures, honey will not freeze solid. Instead, as the temperatures become colder, the viscosity of honey increases. Like most viscous liquids, the honey will become thick and sluggish with decreasing temperature. While appearing or even feeling solid, it will continue to flow at very slow rates.

When sugar syrup is supersaturated, the crystals soon fall out of sollution. Why should honey act differently?

The melting point of crystallized honey is between 40 and 50 °C (104 and 122 °F), depending on its composition. Below this temperature, honey can be either in a metastable state, meaning that it will not crystallize until a seed crystal is added, or, more often, it is in a "labile" state, being saturated with enough sugars to crystallize spontaneously. The rate of crystallization is affected by the ratio of the main sugars, fructose to glucose, as well as the dextrin content. Temperature also affects the rate of crystallization, which is fastest between 13 and 17 °C (55 and 63 °F). Below 5 °C, the honey will not crystallize.

From this I am guessing that in order to make honey crystallize I can either add some seed crystals to it (table sugar), or try to affect the fructose/glucose balance. Possible ways to do this could be:
- Add table sugar (sucrose), which when heated will break down into sucrose and glucose, or
- Add more glucose, or
- Add more fructose
Since I didn't have any glucose or fructose sitting around, I decided to try adding some table sugar. I did this previously using Wild Turkey American Honey and the oven dehydration technique. It did not work.

This time I decided to try the stovetop crystallization technique, adding extra table sugar to Wild Turkey American Honey. I added some as it was boiling, and then as it hit the candy stage at which a liqueur would normally crystalize, I added more.

I kept adding more and more in the hopes that it would crystallize in some way. Eventually I had probably added more sugar than there was liqueur in the first place but it never precipitated out of solution.

When it hardened it was hard but still sticky; kind of like peanut brittle. This type of dehydrated liqueur won't make a dry sugar when crushed, unfortunately.

So I need to think of some new ideas. Any suggestions?

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.
September 6, 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
Studying Sugar: A Resource List
In the Sugar Spirit Project, I've had to use several sources to research material, so I figured I'd list them on this page should you want to read them yourself or check my work.

I'll add to the list as I use more resources.
- Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History By Sidney W. Mintz (1985). This book traces the history of sugar but is primarily a sociological study of sugar consumption in England. It traces how sugar became so popular so fast.
- Sugar: A Bittersweet History By Elizabeth Abbott (2008). In-depth sugar history, spread of sugar, lasting effects of sugar production, finals notes on environmental concerns. Contains a lot of information on sugar and the slave trade.
- Sugar.org, the website of the Sugar Association. Some brief but good information in the Downloads section.
- The Wikipedia entry for Sugar is surprisingly good.
- The sugarcane Wikipedia entry is not bad either.
- The USDA plants database entry is pretty cool.
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 12, 2011
Sugar Spirit: What is Sugarcane?

In the Sugar Spirit project, we're going to look at sugar's history and production, but first we should establish what sugar and sugarcane are.

Sugar and Sucrose

When we talk about sugar, we mean table sugar, or sucrose.

To chemists, sugar refers to a class of 'edible crystalline carbohydrates' that also includes fructose and lactose. But most of us aren't chemists so we won't use the word 'sucrose' so much as just 'sugar.'

Except for now: Sucrose occurs in all green plants. It is a plant food manufactured photosynthetically from carbon dioxide and water.

For table sugar, the plants harvested to make it are sugarcane and sugar beets. We'll get to sugar beets later.

(Sugarcane harvest demo in Guatemala.)

Sugarcane

Sugarcane is a large grass of the family Gramineae. There are six known species.

The most widely grown is saccharum officinarum, which depending on your source is called “noble cane” or “sugar of the apothecaries.” Its stalks that grow as thick as two inches, and 12-15 feet high.

Sugarcane is a subtropical and tropical crop requiring large amount of water and labor. In farming, it is propagated asexually from cuttings of the stem. It becomes ripe in the dry season after anywhere from 6 to 18 months depending on the climate.

In the next post, we'll begin to look at the spread of sugarcane from the Indian Subcontinent to the rest of the world.

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 10, 2011
Announcing the Sugar Spirit Project

Today marks the launch of the second Sponsored Project on Alcademics: The Sugar Spirit. The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum.

Rum is made from any sugarcane derivative and is the real sugar spirit, but in this research project I'll primarily be studying sugar itself.

In writing about cocktails, we often come across recipes calling for different forms of sugar: demerara, muscovado, evaporated organic cane, superfine, etc. I've wanted to study the differences in those sugars for quite a while now so I'm thankful to Bacardi Rum for giving me the support to do so.

Along the way, I'll be looking at the history of sugarcane, its byproducts (including molasses, of course), modern and historical production methods, forms and uses, and much more.

I've put up an outline of future topics for discussion and experimentation. The outline is on the project index page, which can be reached by following this link or clicking the Sugar Spirit project logo above from any blog page you see it on.

This is going to get pretty nerdy, and I know that's how you like it.

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 9, 2011