Brewing ingredients: lactose

Brewing beer can be very simple or very complicated. Some recipes have been refined over decades if not centuries. These are very developed and trying to change anything can be a nightmare.

This is especially true of beer with very strong flavours like a stout or highly hopped beer. These can be very powerful. Others are a very dry beer.

These 2 examples are not to everyone's taste.

A solution to this is lactose. It can be used to balance the dry or extremely strongly flavoured beer. This is why it has increasing popularity in commercial brewing.

Lactose is a sugar. It has a much lower sweetness compared to table sugar or sucrose. It is also the sugar found in dairy products.

This is a problem for those who are lactose intolerant. They can experience a sudden case of the brown alert due to the added lactose.

Other than making beer sweeter lactose has many other purposes and uses. Lactose makes beer have a very different mouth feel and body. The addition of lactose also improves foaming of the beer.