techniques for liquifing candy sugar

[kylesmi]

OK..Brewed my first belgian beer at our brewery. Pain in the Ass, dealing with the candy sugar. First of all I added 60 lbs. to a 7bbl batch on a direct fired kettle. I didnt want to add it in raw form directly to the kettle in fear of it scorching on the bottom of the kettle. So what I did was I took a camp chef cooker with a 15 gallon pot and liquified the sugar before adding it to the kettle.

Anyways it took hours of stiring and stiring and stiring to get it liquified!! Anyone have any sugestions or sources for candy sugar already liquified?

One sticky guy after brewing!!

Thanks, Kyle

[Damase]

Another way of doing it

What I have done, and seen done, is taking out some of the wort, adding some the Candi sugar until it dissolves (stirring away while doing the addition) and then repeating until it is all dissolved. The wort will dissolve the sugar fairly good on it's own, no additional heating is required.

[kugeman]

I've been brewing a Belgian Dubbel with candi sugar for a couple of years on a direct fired 7 bbl system. I always turn off the kettle with about 30 mins left in the boil and just throw the candi sugar in. The previous Head Brewer would then use a garden hoe (and wearing some heavy duty gloves) to stir the wort by pushing the hoe down and pulling it back up (kind of creating a suction/circulation effect in the kettle). Then he'd use the hoe to make sure there weren't any clumps on the bottom of the kettle before firing it back up.

I've done it that way, but instead of using the hoe I've also used the kettle pump (with the outlet cranked way back to avoid cavitation) to do a small whirlpool to dissolve the sugar. I make sure that when I add the sugar I spread it out evenly across the kettle to avoid a big pile of sugar in the bottom. The whole process takes less than 5 minutes. I've never had any scorching problems with this method, but I should say I'm only adding about 30lbs...