Forum
2 to 1 'rich' sugar syrup versus 1 to 1 'simple' syrup
The balance between sweet and sour is crucial to the majority of cocktails and consistently producing balanced cocktails is made easier when using sugar...
Zach Schwartz
22nd July 2023 at 22:42
I know I’m nearly a year late, but chemist here! As you’ve observed, the ultimate volume of syrup ≠ the volume of sugar + volume of water, so comparing Brix is definitely the way to go for accuracy. However, there is one additional wrinkle when comparing syrup sweetness: heating sugar and water together actually causes the sugar (sucrose) to undergo hydrolysis into glucose and fructose! This will make calculation of Brix inaccurate, since the Brix scale assumes the solution contains only sucrose. Is that a problem? Yes, because the 1:1 mixture of fructose and glucose is 1.3x sweeter than the sucrose it is derived from! So if someone is using 1:1 syrup made without heating, to achieve the same sweetness, they may truly need to use twice as much (1.5 x 1.3 = 1.95).
24th November at 22:33
Realistically, hydrolysis should have very little effect on the sugar in this case. For the scale of time we would typically see making a pint of simple syrup *with only water*, say 20 minutes of boiling, very little of the sugar will hydrolyze. At "100 °C, ...the first-order rate constant for sucrose hydrolysis is about 10^−6 per second". I estimate (20 minutes)x(60 seconds/minute)x(10^-6) = o.oo12 or about 0.1%. cf. https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/116764/how-long-would-it-take-for-sucrose-to-undergo-hydrolysis-in-boiling-water