Let’s talk about 🍺. What I call a good wheat beer is 210 calories for a 12 oz can or bottle. I know it has sugar of some kind.
I got one out of the frig and it was mostly frozen. What dribbled out of the can is very shiny and sticky all over the driveway and garage floor.
Can a chemist explain how that sugar taste different in beer.. than say a soda (because nearly all soda would have less than 210 calories.)
In: 0
Calories ≠ sugar
While all calories are broken down into glucose in one form or another, not all calories come from sugar
For example Erdinger wheat beer has 220 calories
0 grams fat
13 grams carbohydrates
2 grams protein
0 grams sugar
Carbohydrates provide roughly 4 calories per gram
And protein provides roughly 9 calories per gram
Alcohol provides 7 calories per gram
[removed]
Not a chemist, but the ELI5 as well as I can explain is there are sugar added early in the brewing process, in the wort. Then some yeast is added to the wort. They eat up the sugar and release carbon dioxide and alcohol. That is how beer gets the bubbles and booze in it.
Beer Chemistry Supergeek Here-
In order to ferment something you need sugar, microorganisms eat the sugar and convert it to a mix of acids and poison (carbonic acid, sometimes lactic and acetic acid, and alcohol). This preserves the fermented something by making it inedible to other living things.
There are many, many different kinds of sugar out there, it’s a whole family of related chemicals. The microorganisms we ferment beer with can only digest a very small subset of those sugars. Unlike wine, which is made from fruit and contains almost exclusively “fructose” (fruit sugar), beer is made from grain and grains contain many different kinds of sugars.
In the early stages of making the beer, sugars from grain are chemically converted into a variety of smaller, easier to digest sugars for the microorganisms. But still, they can’t ferment them all. This is one of the big differences between beer and wine. Beer will have something called “Residual Sugar” and sometimes brewers will do this deliberately, they will add things like Lactose (milk sugar) and crystalized caramel sugars that the microorganisms cannot digest. This residual sugar is part of the reason why beers needs to have a bittering agent added otherwise it would be kind of gross and overly sweet. Modern beers typically use Hops as a bittering agent to counteract the sweetness.
So long story short, calories from beer come from two sources, 1) the alcohol content and 2) the residual sugar.
Something that’s very dry (low sugar) like a saison or a sour beer is almost all alcohol calories, sweeter beers (before bittering agents are added) like an IPA or a milk stout have a fairly significant amount of residual sugar which also contributes to their calorie loads.
So something like a double IPA has both, a ton of residual sugar (in this case the sugar is counteracting the heavily bitter hops additions of that style) and a high alcohol content. A double IPA is sort of like taking a red wine and dumping a Coke’s worth of sugar into it at the same time, tons of yummy, delicious calories.
Latest Answers