Even the sugar industry struggled for a long time to get the color of beet sugar as white as cane sugar. That's why cane sugar was so popular even though it had to be imported from an ocean away. Even my grandmother considered light brown sugar inferior even though it makes no real difference today anymore. I think the trick to get the rest of the residue out is activated carbon, but creating that with primitive tools may do more harm than good.
The first time I was aware of eating beet sugar was when I lived in Russia. It was far cheaper, since it could be produced domestically. It had a slight umami flavor and a hint of pink-but it worked just the same as white sugar once added to anything. I would expect the total removal of umami to involve some pretty harsh processing.
I live in Minnesota as well and you can easily find and buy actual Cane Sugar! I always buy C&H Brand Sugar and it is Cane Sugar!!! Then there are Raw Sugar that you can buy and is also Cane Sugar.
Agreed, I even think it could help allot to figure out how to things with primitive tools if there tried with modern tools first. As long as both versions are somewhat contained as different parts of the process i dont see how anyone could have an issue with it.
I personally disagree. I would prefer it on a second channel. Great content, and I would 100% watch it, But I cant deny that I was disappointed seeing the drill press in the intro. Either way, Great content! Im nit picking.
@@The_Flying_Yeti I'd like it, *just* for chemistry it would make it far better to have a lower number of variables, sometimes it's just downright depressing to fail and not know which of many things to even start to fix
As a note: beet sugar is used in the United States rather than cane sugar because of tariffs. The US subsidizes its agricultural products as a matter of national security. Cane sugar is actually very cheap to make: I've lived in places where its cost is equivalent to flour. But the tariffs push the price of sugar way up. If you're looking for a place where obscure laws from decades ago effect your daily life, this is the place to be.
Tariffs also protect the domestic US cane sugar industry in Florida. The U.S. Sugar Corporation, based in Clewiston, Florida, is owned by the Fanjul family who are very active in Florida politics.
Beet sugar supports the US economy. If they allowed in cane sugar the whole upper half of the United States would struggle. MT, ND, SD, MN, MI all rely on beet sugar to help support their economy.
@@Drew-in-NoDak Sure dude. Most people in the upper half of the US are sugar farmers and there is nothing of value those people exchange to anyone anywhere in the world that would drive a broader economic interaction with the rest of the world in order to not be 'struggling' to pay taxes and costs imposed on them by government that exceed the value they get from the currency when the government spends it relative to spending it themselves without the government waste of resources and idiots running them that break the rules that make systems stable we all use making them un stable by the declaration of politicians and dissolving wealth being exchanged in the market for the region so that total in circulation drops and people can't manage to maintain the baseline needs for daily trades for food and rent by loss of value of currency relative to the milk that is just as valuable to a person today as 100 years ago but in practical production is 100 times cheaper to produce tied to resources so government breaks currency's function to exists as representation of value to make the exchange of our goods and services convenient and setting rules that overtime trend the population toward higher rates of poverty and lower economic output due to the forced incentive structures. If sugar supported the US economy then sugar would be the most valuable substance on the planet and the rest of the world would be not capable of providing enough to meet their own demands for sugar and the us would exceed its own allowing for export of sugar from the US to EVERYWHERE to make the US the world largest economic market you can buy from or sell in. Economies are supported by human activity and actions. Unless you think a government is a god and should be the thing that decides what humans see value in and how they decide to exchange what they offer to others with the intent of both parties seeing it beneficial should be decided in permanence by some asshole legislator with relationships to printing what should by kept precious as a container to hold value we use in representation we can hold on to and not see it suddenly worthless. There is a reason you can't have socialist or communist economies and loss of property rights that will be a stable system for long in the world without it being parasitic to a wealth generating source. They will just make that source your savings overtime by spending it themselves on what they want calling it public spending and do so on massive scales that exceed what is even collected from the already high amount of taxes annually the longer you hold onto currency the less its worth and normalizing that action of those in government to simply 2% of the worlds total wealth as value by deficit spending consistently making the currencies ability to store value as savings rather inconsistent though what is called inflation.
My grandmother used to grow sugar beets, and hers were huge compared to the ones you had grown. Her secret was a 50/50 sand to topsoil mix in her garden in the area where she had her beets. That way when they were growing, they were able to push the soil away, and the sand allowed the soil to hold on to the water longer (her words, not mine). Her beets were about the size of medium cantelopes.
@@davidgraham2673 Yes, she lived during the depression and she said that was when she learned how to do it. Up until the late 70s, she always made her own sugar at home from her beets. I wasn't really interested to learn how to do it, and so, I can't offer much in the way of help for you. The only thing I do remember is that she peeled the beets and then cut them into chunks and then ran them through her hand grinder into a bowl of water that had some powder mixed in that kept the ground up beets from turning brown. What the powder was, I don't know. I just remember that it came in a can like McCormick spices did. It was a tall white can, but that was all I remember. Sorry I can't be of more help.
@@dablakh0l193 , I'm the curious type, and when I read comments that I find interesting, I try to learn new things. I believe we've lost so much concerning knowledge from the ways people used to make do with common, or even uncommon things. I do know that sulfur (of all things) is used in sugar production, but I don't know if home applications/methods used it as well as commercial companies. You can never know too much of the old ways. Thank you for the response, and your original comment. Have a blessed New Year!
@@dablakh0l193 Remembering from my mothers days in the kitchen in the 60's and 70's my guess would be that the powder could well be citric acid. It was commonly used in jams and preserves to stop the browning, and comes in a tall white can.
For your final products, honestly a pretty close result. One thing I noticed was during the centrifugal process, in my plant, it's washed while spinning with above-boiling water (held under pressure so it doesn't boil), that gives you the white sugar and helps spin off all the impurities. Molasses is actually a byproduct of a byproduct. And for full disclosure, I work at a sugar beet plant
I don't work in a sugar plant, but I think his centrifuge is set up wrong. It's basically a rotating strainer, that separates according to size, whereas a centrifuge is meant to separate according to specific gravity. So you need a slightly cone shaped can, and when it spins, the heavier part of the liquid climbs higher on the sides, and escapes first.
@@falcondark5338 I'm not sure on the geometry of our centrifugals but I believe they are just basic cylinders and layered screens. Fine enough where crystals won't pass through, but washings will. I have a Short I uploaded if you want to see it in action. Easier to see it that way
I remember in science class we used a jar with highly saturated sugar water in it with a string dangling from the lid into the water. After a few days in the window, the string started producing sugar crystals on it. You should try this with your creation and see if it makes crystals. Good luck 👍
You have to supersaturate the water with sugar, by dissolving sugar in very hot water, so that when it cools, there's more sugar in the water than it wants to hold dissolved at room temperature
If your sugar say "cane sugar" it can only be sugar cane. If it just says "sugar" it could be corn, beet, or cane, or a combination of those and a host of other sugars.
If you were ever to attempt this experiment again, there is a simple method to increasing the amount of sugar in root crops that has the added benefit of removing the bitter flavor. Leave your beets in the ground until after a frost or two. The plant naturally converts some of its starches into sugar to protect itself from freezing. I am convinced many of our root crops are supposed to be harvested in early winter before they freeze but after the cold weather sweetening has occurred.
My family actually owns a sugar beet plot!Beet sugar is extremely common in my country,and I've always associated sugar with beets instead of canes.We also use birch sugar but is consudered more "alternative".Up until I was 12 I didn't even know sugar could be made from different plants.
For a long time I kind of assumed sugar cane plants just grew ready made sugar crystals and they just threshed it and bagged it. And by a long time I mean until I was 30. In fairness - they do call it RAW sugar.
The sugar you made looks actually pretty legit, considering the tools used and it not being a "professional" set up. Historically there used to be huge variations/gradients in the quality of pretty much any ingredient, from flower to salt and sugar between what "peasants" and "nobles" used, where the work and cost invested would be vastly different. Exploring these differences might also be an interesting avenue, though for food that might cross over with Townsends or Tasting History, but who knows, might be an interesting crossover to make different "products" and see what i.e. Max Miller makes of/with them.
I suspect your experiment was made extra hard by the small size of those beets. Sugar beets have many layers of meristematic tissue that are the cells that as the beet grows expand and store sugar. The number of layers is pretty much fixed. So a small beet doesn't have fewer layers, it has many layers that have not expanded and store very little sugar. I'd guess that most of the volume of your beets was contributing more to the impurities you had to remove than to the sugar. But I agree, sugar beets are miserable things. I worked with them when I was a horticulture student at a university in a region of the country where many sugar beets are grown. The sugar content is ok these days but beets also have more protein in them compared to other sugar sources and that makes the refining process difficult. And as you say the molasses, without more refinement, has an off flavor. Much of it is used as a cattle food supplement. Cows love it.
@@irissupercoolsy Yup. In a good year they get huge. And a lot of that volume is the sugar-rich tissue. If the northern part of the world had to grow it's own sugar crops sugar beets would be hands down the way to do it. But compared to sugar cane they are a distant 2nd place.
@@yumatom Agreed. Around here cattle get the beet tops, and the spent beets themselves once the sugar has been extracted. Nothing of the beet goes to waste, except the refined sugar, that mainly goes to the waist ;)
When I was a boy, there was a huge sugar factory not far away. I still remember the distinct, quite pleasant smell of the process, which always started at the start of winter. To this day, that smell (which I haven't smelled in over 30 years) will always be associated with the changing seasons.
No. I have no other original recollection of sugar sources except beet. I've known this all my life. I found out sugar can come from cane or honey or other sources waaay later.
This is very fun. I'm from Germany and my grandpa was a farmer who grew sugar beets. I have distinct memories of helping him to weed one of the fields he grew them on.
The biggest (or at least most iconic) brand of white sugar here has the word sugar beet printed on the front of the bag along with a drawing of a beet, so it's hardly an obscure fact. Cane sugar is a speciality in Northern Europe
Also not in the US. When I was younger I used to visit my grandma in the village, during harvesting season she always used to put sugar beets into the furnace ashtray with skin on it, so they were slowly cooking, and even kinda caramelized inside.
I live in south-east Denmark, and I suspect you might be from somewhere nearby, as this part of the country is the sugar beet central of Scandinavia. I remember when there was a Sugar factory in every major town, now there's only two left. After harvest the sugar beets were left in big piles at the edge of the field, and as boys we used to steal a few to cut and eat 🙂
@@Aoderic From Denmark too. Remember a school mate had a sugar beet with him in his lunchbox and i had a taste. It was surprisingly sugary, like there were sugar crystals in it. (:
I tasted sugar beets on a farm here in Switzerland, and it was inedible. Sweet, yes, but also had an extremely unpleasant astringent quality that made your mouth tingle.
I live in Louisiana where we mainly cultivate cane sugar. But, I like how sugar is produced from different sources. Beats are also used in sweet dishes, such as red velvet dessert's!
You should thank Napoleon, flooding the European market with affordable sugar. By 1806, cane sugar had virtually disappeared from the shelves of European shops because of the british. In 1811, French scientists presented Napoleon with two loaves of sugar made from sugar beet. Napoleon was so impressed he decreed that 32,000 hectares of beet should be planted and provided assistance to get the factories established in his Empire. Within a few years there were more than 40 sugar beet factories, in now today Northern France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Denmark. One of the many great thing the Emperor made in his life, he also wished to discover the new world and live in Louisiana.
Been around sugar beets most of my life. The beet flavor and other impurities are removed with milk of lime & CO2 reaction. They make the lime milk at the refinery, add it to the liquid, then pump CO2 through it. The impurities precipitate out with the lime. That leaves a liquid that's clean enough to start cooking down, etc. Michigan sugar is featured in a pretty decent video on here that details the process. This is the Bay City plant. Picking up a friend who works there is the closest I've been to that plant but I've been inside both the Sebewaing and Caro plants. I grew up in Caro and have delivered several hundred, if not thousands of loads of beets between the two plants, most of them at Sebewaing though. Michigan Sugar is pretty good about educating anyone who's interested about how the whole process works.
In Germany, beet molasses called Zuckerrübensirup is a staple breakfast food, usually served on a buttered slice of bread, like jam. You can also make delicious drinks or cakes with it, because it brings flavour along with sweetness :)
In the netherlands we have apple syrup, which is named that because it is partly made from apple juice, but the main component is actually beet molasses too and it's eaten in the same way.
Here in Australia, cane sugar is extremely common, while beet sugar is virtually unheard of and unused. We've the perfect climate for growing massive sugar cane plantations in Queensland, and as a child, I remember ash raining down on the town every year during the pre-harvest sugarcane field burnings. Bonus, we get access to honey-like golden syrup. Perfect as a binder when making tasty Anzac biscuits.
You can clean it up with a re-crystallization. Dissolve 3 parts sugar to 1 part water over low heat. Allow it to cool then drop in a few grains of already processed sugar to act as seed crystals. Once you get some larger crystals, break them up coarse and rinse with ethanol that is as cold as you can get it (think 190 proof Everclear that has been in a chest freezer on it's lowest setting). Ice water is another option, but it dissolves sugar much more readily than ethanol, resulting in higher losses. Cold is the key, either way, as it slows the dissolution.
I've been watching for years and to see Andy going from "trying to recreate something" to succeeding and refining the methods is really amazing. Congratulations!
My grandmother lived in Essex. I stayed with her for holidays on many occasions, There was a local farmer growing sugar beet. At around 9 or so i got to 'help' with the harvest then go to the processing plant and see the crop be delivered. I may also have been allowed to sit in the tractor seat as it harvested the beet but clearly I'm not admitting to that as it may not be technically legal. Disclaimer: this was 50 years ago in the UK so things were different back then.
Look at any of the chemistry channels, you'll see purifying stuff is extremely hard. Getting from a natural-ish turbanado sugar (spun) all the way to a perfectly white sugar requires more than a centrifuge, it requires a great deal of filtration. Bone char is often used in that step, combining both the calcium carbonate and activated charcoal steps in one. But it likely only works on very large scale...
Beet sugar was a big deal in Utah for many, many decades. It was hard to grow up in my area without realizing its impact the U and I sugar company provided much of the area's sugar into the 1980s. And the beet plant that processed much of the sugar in the early days was just down the road from the towns I grew up in. The smoke stack is still there and know functions as a cell tower. Feel free to contact me next time you are in the area and I will make time for a visit and tour!
hey neighbor! here in Idaho my grandfather retired well from one of their last factories in Nampa. it's actually still running to this day though I actually don't know who owns it. ever since I was a kid I've seen mounds upon mounds of sugarbeets being fed into that thing. it's quite an interesting process to say the least
Sugar beets really made headway during the Second World War. My friends grandfather worked at a sugar beet factory in Canada during this time. They also stated growing them in England because of the blockades. The rationing worked out to 8 oz per person per week. That is the recommended limit for sugar consumption now. Health improved very much during the war. Especially in England. Before the war, thanks to the depression, many people were living on a high sugar, plant based diet. Diabetes was quite high. With rationing, if you could not afford the meats, eggs and dairy rations you got them for free. They knew they needed every worker and they needed a healthy work force. This was a short lived substity as everyone was soon employed. Sugar was used in preserving, so not much was left over for sweets. Most people still preserved back then. Especially in Canada. I grew up cooking from the Victory Cookbook from New Brunswick Canada. Also, the Canadian Cook book. Both use way less sugar than you would use in modern recipes from Canada. Also more blackstrap as a replacement. I have noticed modern America Cook books use even more sugar than Canadian recipies. I don't have any old American cook books, but assume that once they entered the war, the recipies reflected the rationing.
I've been to a sugar processing facility. They do drying steps under vacuum so that it can be done at low temperature. Heating steps use jacketed vessels rather than electric so that heating is uniform heating rather than charring "hot spots" where the heating elements touch the cooking vessel.
I lived for a few years in Billings, Montana. One big use of irrigation water from the Yellowstone River near Billings has been watering the sugar beet fields. The problem: the river water is very hard, very rich in minerals. After a few decades of irrigation, so many minerals have been added to the soil of the irrigated land that no crops will grow in it. Only a few salt-tolerant plants, usually considered weeds, can survive. No more growing beets or anything else useful. Producing sugar from beets or cane would not be economically practical in the United States if there weren’t heavy taxes on imported sugar. High-fructose corn syrup would also be less attractive in food and drink manufacturing if imported sugar weren’t artificially expensive. Sugar beets are fascinating, especially the history of how they came to be, but… I don’t know if they’re a really practical crop anywhere except due to political pressures rather than economic ones.
When I was a kid in Florida we used to chew on sugar cane stalks. We got them growing wild in wet areas and even propagated them to our backyard wet areas. Publix would also sell cane in the produce section. They may still do it in season. Sugar from cane or beets is the same thing after full refinement. But I believe in less refinement so we use a little bit of turbinado in regular cooking or to sweeten iced tea. I'm past having any kind of craving for sweets, so black coffee, plain teas, and bitter beers are my favorite drinks after ice water.
Really like this look at answering the question of, "can I attempt this without just primitive tech?". Think the only way this could have been better would have been something like a crossover with Nigel over on NileRed for the chemistry analysis of what's going on and what needs to be done to separate things.
Here in Australia where we farm a lot of sugar cane in the north, almost all of our sugar is cane sugar. It's interesting that elsewhere in the world other plant sources are used, namely beets and corn in the USA!
I like how the he introduces the topic by telling us how we probably have misconceptions about where our sugar comes from and then shows us some red beets and says that’s where it comes from.
Ive had sugarbeets as a kid and they were delicious. Got them fresh off a field too. I could realy taste that they later get turned into sugar. Also the farmer told me a lot about it too which was so cool to me back then
"I could really taste that they later get turned into sugar" So... the sugar tasted like sugar? I'm just not sure I understand what you're saying there... the ones you tasted _specifically did not_ get turned into sugar... if you're saying they tasted sweet in general, well, yeah, there's um... there's a bunch of sugar in sugar beets...
Funny. We had sugar beats growing all around us, I once sliced one up expecting it to be super sweet and it was terrible. Like a Super dry taste I could not get rid of. The adults laughed at me and said there was a lot more to getting sugar from it than cutting it open.
yes a lot of sugar is from sugar beets but you can still go to any store and find pure cane sugar the best part is with the price of beet sugar it forces cane sugar manufactures to keep an equal price to be competitive . growing up in cane sugar heaven Florida I have always used domino sugar. also just a bit of FYI sugar beets need to be processed with in the first hour of harvesting if not they start loosing sugar . they respond like berry's and start to eat the sugar to keep the fruit or in the case of beets the root alive
All things considered it's pretty impressive that you made raw sugar and that it was THAT close to processed levels of white Just the sugar in the raw itself is cool by my standards
Great video as always! You may find a pair of silicone oven mitts handy for future experiments that call for squeezing a hot bag - mine made doing BIAB (brew in a bag) beer brewing a lot nicer. They do double duty as regular oven mitts in my kitchen, way nicer to clean than cloth ones.
To increase the sugar yield of the beets wait until after the first frost to harvest. Also there is a two step process that is used to get the sugar out leaving the molasses as a by product that can then be reprocessed to get a lower quality sugar. The Thick Juice, what they make the white sugar out of, is also bleached with chlorine to get that crystal white color.
I work at a sugar beet processing plant, and can confirm, there is no chlorine used. Thick juice is boiled to speed the crystal growth, along with an injection of fondant (powdered sugar in an alcohol solution). After the boiling process, the, now called, White Massecute is dropped into batch centrifugals and washed with extremely hot water. Then cooled, dried and stored for sale.
They might use a bleeding agent in the US, but in Europe they certainly don't. It's a 99.8% pure product, they keep it white by washing it in boiling water.
Naturally but we pull so much sucrose by the time we make a molasses cut, that it's below food grade for people. Farmers usually buy it to spray over feed of some sort to sweeten it just a touch.
In Europe we use sugarbeats for our sugar because during the Napoleonic Wars the British blockaded mainland Europe preventing access to the American colonies where sugarcane was grown. So we switched to sugar beets. When the war was over and the blockade lifted we kept using sugar beets because we already had those production chains setup and never switched back to sugar cane. We also don't use corn syrup here, that's a very American thing.
So, a good centrifuge is worth the effort to build for a lot of reasons. The diameter of the spinning apparatus is actually critical for determining the amount of force you can place in the contents at a given speed. Centrifuges and ball mills are simple enough devices that you can build them yourself for most scales, but are actually super useful and awesome things to have.
Oh no, I definitely think of sugar beets. I thought that this was incredibly common knowledge? I remember getting some pure cane sugar from Thailand when I was a kid and being delighted.
Hey Andy, long time fan here. I really like this series and enjoy your journey through the ages. I was just wondering when you were going to show us how to make a horse? They were very important to the advancement of many societies and I've always wondered how we did it. Thanks! And keep up the good work :)
This was excellent and I’m really pleased with how your skills in processing and fabricating has progressed. I hope you feel proud of this, because you’ve come a long way and it shows :)
many years ago I visited a sugar beet factory in England, they said that at one point they could only make brown sugar until someone realised that adding a cup full of white sugar to the centrifuge once it had got up to full speed turned the whole batch white, and it was an incredible thing to see about one or two hundred Kilos of brown sugar suddenly turning white in the blink of an eye.
This was great! I enjoy the whole "building up the tech tree" thing you've been primarily doing, but I'd love more of these deeper dives in topics related to what you've been exploring in the main series.
before dehydration you should try mixing in a little Irish moss. it is used in brewing to make sediments settle. also you can pour the acid solution that you use to prevent oxidation into the food processor so it doesn't oxidize in the container while you are cutting it up.
This was super interesting! Also I didn't know sugar beets were the same plant as the red beetroots. But is corn syrup really famous over there in the US? I don't think I've ever heard of it before, except maybe in this channel.
Yeah, it's geography. In the Western Hemisphere, there are places to grow cane in South USA, Central America, and South America. In the East, that zone is the Mediterranean Sea, North Africa, the Middle East... Not good climate for sugar cane...
Really fascinating! I wonder what an in between process would be like. Didn’t they make sugar cones because that somehow separated out the molasses? I’d love to try that one day. I’m all for chopping things in the food processor though! Btw, don’t they do a bleaching step in commercial processing? Surely that accounts for the colour difference. The colour of yours looks about the same as unbleached cane sugar (we only have cane sugar here so I’ve never seen unbleached beet sugar to compare). I have some sugar beet seeds and plan to try processing my own soon. Not sure I want to do your washing setup. That looked nightmareish. Maybe I’ll end up growing canes instead so I don’t have to deal with the beetiness.
Why it now makes our sugar? It's what white sugar's been made of for 60 years. I've known this since elementary school in the 70's. It literally states the sugar is derived from sugar beets on the packaging. I'd be more than a bit surprised if sugar cane would even be what comes to mind for the majority of people that shop for groceries in N. America over the last 50-60 years. Corn for HFCS, and beets for suga,r, has been common knowledge since the 50's and 60's when both industries started being heavily subsidized by the US.
Sugarcane based sweets taste great. The extra minor flavoring especially when you are using a more raw unpurified source of sugarcane sugar is wonderful in a ton of recipes. It's such a shame that big business focuses directly on cheap processed sugar instead, though.
I personally don't mind since it drives my resident state's economy here in Idaho. my great grandpa worked in the sugarbeet factory and retired well from it. it's good in my opinion that arable land here in a colder temperate zone can still be used for making sugar. sugarcane is typically only viable in subtropics or tropics, so it's a big thing for us here in Idaho. consider also that if a homesteader in the temperate US wants to make sugar themselves they need to grow sugarbeet and not cane and use a process like in the video, it's the option we have here up north and it works pretty well
East Anglia in the UK is a big sugar beet growing area. I've regularly driven past Wissington, Europe's largest sugar beet processing plant. Lit up at night it looks like something out of Blade Runner. I've also worked in Bury St Edmunds where British Sugar has facilities with big chimneys for the steam. It occasionally smelled like baked potatoes. In the UK sugar beet factories tend to work 24 hours a day between September & March(?). That includes Christmas Day. Hard to believe sugar beet & beetroot are virtually the same plant (much like the brassicas).
btw, squeezing the solids will yield you a ton of impurities. Less sugar yes, but a lot more additional stuff as well that wouldn't otherwise be washed off.
This title is a bit more clickbaity than i like. Because nearly All of our sugar here in Europe (Germany for me) comes from Sugarbeets. And many many people know that, for sure. Oh, and also "we" celebrate the Sugar Festival in the Town Zeitz, called "Zeitzer Zuckerfest".
I know they use heat exchangers when processing them industrially. I was a heat exchanger tech for a few years. They would just hose the floor down with water and keep it wet to prevent the floor from getting sticky. I was walking through the office and piece of linoleum stuck to my boot when I was walking through.
HFCS being "most famous" is a very american phenomenon. I don't know of any other country that uses it in significant volumes, other than maybe in products imported from the US. Canada maybe?
The only reason US food manufacturers use it is because it’s dirt cheap there. And the only reason HFCS is so cheap there is because the corn used to make it is highly subsidized. :(
the process of cycling water over the beets is used often in chemistry. it's called soxhlet extraction. you can pretty easily buy the glassware that does this
(reads caption) This mysterious source of sugar is the sugar beet, isn't it... (watches video) Yup. Further north, sugar beets have long been the primary source of sugar. It's only in the past few decades where there's been a shift to cane sugar, mainly due to the lifting of tariffs and modern shipping making it so much cheaper.
@@irissupercoolsy They have a unique smell don't they always seems stronger in the mornings especially if the weather conditions are right to cause fog.
@@currentliveoccupant The main one I think of is when I lived in Payette the smell from the one in Ontario would drift over in the mornings. Of course I also lived in Fruitland and Caldwell at different times afterwords so I still would regularly smell the sugar beets.
My father ran a highway construction business. He paved I75 thru Flint, Michigan. One night, after a large section of concrete was poured a bunch of local kids gathered up the sugar beets that had fallen off trucks. They threw the beets into the wet concrete. The next morning we had to take jack hammers to remove the sugar beets, them patch in the holes. They make great baseballs, but tend to explode when the bat hits them. Don't follow too close behind a sugar beet truck.
Lived in Europe for a couple years in my 20s and found sugar tasted weird there. Having grown up on cane sugar only, discovering beet sugar was a shock.
Just wanted to add my voice to the great number of people here saying: this was great, and I'd love to see more like it! Definitely don't need to worry about it not being full primitive tech, it was very interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed it, I'd love to see more videos like this where you tackle DIY'ing modern industrial processes. Really enjoyed this one, thanks!
my family is from an area where sugar beet production and processing is very common. whenever we go there to visit it always smells like sugar beets. very unique smell.
Shoot... In the US, if the package doesn't specifically state that it is Cane sugar, it is probably beets. I used to live near a sugar factory that processed beets... quite odorous in the summer. But you have to dry out the fibre at the end of the process so they can cart the waste product to the local pig/cattle farmers.
Brita filters aren't just filters, they also chemically bind to various molecules that might be part of the surface of a bacteria or virus like fats, proteins and sugars. Not surprised at all that you'd be losing enough sugar to notice.
Please be very careful with that drill press. Especially when you're using it for something it wasn't designed for, take some time to really think about what might happen when it starts spinning. You can hurt yourself really easily with it. Also, avoid wearing loose clothing that might get caught and pull you in. That includes long sleeves, hood strings, etc.
I have a book on sugar beet and its history. I can't find it right now. I have way too many books. However two tricks used in the field. Nitrogen atmospheres: all the machinery is in a box filed with nitrogen and no oxygen. This is not apparent to the untrained eye. It just looks like safety screens or screens to keep things clean. This prevents oxidation. Kilotons of nitrogen are used in the food industry to cook things without oxidation or burning. Trick two is vacuum drying, the same process for milk products, and again its air free. The third process is well known. Double crystallization. Take the first pass product and add distilled water to dissolve then recrystallize with a pure seed grain of sugar. This leaves the impurities behind but requires very special conditions. I hope this helps with next years crop.
You could do a recristalization to purify the sugar. Disolve it in water or something, filter the solids, then recristalize. You could recristalize using low solvent volume and temperature change, for example, or boiling off the exess.
Really bugs me that you showed Beetroots and a pack of white sugar giving the impression that the white sugar comes from Beetroots, you can probably make sugar from Beetroots but you make it from Sugar Beets like you do later in the video. Makes the whole idea of the video seem like a clickbait.
Awesome, I've been hoping for a video about sugar refining for a while! I think this is a good way to intersperse some modern tools into the series--the part where you compared the "from scratch with modern equipment" to the commercial product AND the one you made with more primitive tools was super interesting. I agree with what Ch3zter said in a different comment, that trying the project with modern tools first may be helpful in knowing what to do with the primitive equipment.
When you're at the grey cloudy solution stage you might try using diatomaceous earth filtration. That's very handy for chemistry work where you can't get a solution clear, and food grade diatomaceous earth isn't expensive. Use a buchner funnel, and vacuum adapter. Put in filter paper, wet the filter paper with water, add a thin layer of diatomaceous earth, wet that and make sure it fully covers the bottom of the filter, add another layer of filter paper on top, wet that, and it's ready to use. It is FANTASTIC for catching the solids in solutions and leaving behind the material (in your case sugar) that's in solution. Orders of magnitude better than your brita filter.
Where I come from in the Imperial Valley of Southeastern California we have a Holly Sugar Plant that makes sugar exclusively from sugar beets. It is one of the bigest employers in the Imperial County if you count all the farmers and the people that work for them. It's a fascinating thing to watch the process in action.
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yo sup 1st reply good work
Even the sugar industry struggled for a long time to get the color of beet sugar as white as cane sugar. That's why cane sugar was so popular even though it had to be imported from an ocean away. Even my grandmother considered light brown sugar inferior even though it makes no real difference today anymore.
I think the trick to get the rest of the residue out is activated carbon, but creating that with primitive tools may do more harm than good.
The first time I was aware of eating beet sugar was when I lived in Russia. It was far cheaper, since it could be produced domestically. It had a slight umami flavor and a hint of pink-but it worked just the same as white sugar once added to anything. I would expect the total removal of umami to involve some pretty harsh processing.
they have a bleaching step in there to make the sugar white
I live in Minnesota as well and you can easily find and buy actual Cane Sugar!
I always buy C&H Brand Sugar and it is Cane Sugar!!!
Then there are Raw Sugar that you can buy and is also Cane Sugar.
You should definitely not shy away from DIY without going full primitive technology. This was really enjoyable.
Agreed, I even think it could help allot to figure out how to things with primitive tools if there tried with modern tools first. As long as both versions are somewhat contained as different parts of the process i dont see how anyone could have an issue with it.
Yes
I personally disagree.
I would prefer it on a second channel.
Great content, and I would 100% watch it, But I cant deny that I was disappointed seeing the drill press in the intro.
Either way, Great content! Im nit picking.
Agreed
@@The_Flying_Yeti I'd like it, *just* for chemistry
it would make it far better to have a lower number of variables, sometimes it's just downright depressing to fail and not know which of many things to even start to fix
As a note: beet sugar is used in the United States rather than cane sugar because of tariffs. The US subsidizes its agricultural products as a matter of national security. Cane sugar is actually very cheap to make: I've lived in places where its cost is equivalent to flour. But the tariffs push the price of sugar way up. If you're looking for a place where obscure laws from decades ago effect your daily life, this is the place to be.
Corn syrup is used in most processed foods in America
Tariffs also protect the domestic US cane sugar industry in Florida. The U.S. Sugar Corporation, based in Clewiston, Florida, is owned by the Fanjul family who are very active in Florida politics.
Here in Argentina sugar is mostly from sugar cane and it's cheaper than flour
Beet sugar supports the US economy. If they allowed in cane sugar the whole upper half of the United States would struggle. MT, ND, SD, MN, MI all rely on beet sugar to help support their economy.
@@Drew-in-NoDak Sure dude. Most people in the upper half of the US are sugar farmers and there is nothing of value those people exchange to anyone anywhere in the world that would drive a broader economic interaction with the rest of the world in order to not be 'struggling' to pay taxes and costs imposed on them by government that exceed the value they get from the currency when the government spends it relative to spending it themselves without the government waste of resources and idiots running them that break the rules that make systems stable we all use making them un stable by the declaration of politicians and dissolving wealth being exchanged in the market for the region so that total in circulation drops and people can't manage to maintain the baseline needs for daily trades for food and rent by loss of value of currency relative to the milk that is just as valuable to a person today as 100 years ago but in practical production is 100 times cheaper to produce tied to resources so government breaks currency's function to exists as representation of value to make the exchange of our goods and services convenient and setting rules that overtime trend the population toward higher rates of poverty and lower economic output due to the forced incentive structures.
If sugar supported the US economy then sugar would be the most valuable substance on the planet and the rest of the world would be not capable of providing enough to meet their own demands for sugar and the us would exceed its own allowing for export of sugar from the US to EVERYWHERE to make the US the world largest economic market you can buy from or sell in.
Economies are supported by human activity and actions. Unless you think a government is a god and should be the thing that decides what humans see value in and how they decide to exchange what they offer to others with the intent of both parties seeing it beneficial should be decided in permanence by some asshole legislator with relationships to printing what should by kept precious as a container to hold value we use in representation we can hold on to and not see it suddenly worthless. There is a reason you can't have socialist or communist economies and loss of property rights that will be a stable system for long in the world without it being parasitic to a wealth generating source. They will just make that source your savings overtime by spending it themselves on what they want calling it public spending and do so on massive scales that exceed what is even collected from the already high amount of taxes annually the longer you hold onto currency the less its worth and normalizing that action of those in government to simply 2% of the worlds total wealth as value by deficit spending consistently making the currencies ability to store value as savings rather inconsistent though what is called inflation.
My grandmother used to grow sugar beets, and hers were huge compared to the ones you had grown. Her secret was a 50/50 sand to topsoil mix in her garden in the area where she had her beets. That way when they were growing, they were able to push the soil away, and the sand allowed the soil to hold on to the water longer (her words, not mine). Her beets were about the size of medium cantelopes.
When they showed the conveyor belt, it had huge beets like you described.
Did your grandmother make sugar from her beets?
@@davidgraham2673 Yes, she lived during the depression and she said that was when she learned how to do it. Up until the late 70s, she always made her own sugar at home from her beets. I wasn't really interested to learn how to do it, and so, I can't offer much in the way of help for you. The only thing I do remember is that she peeled the beets and then cut them into chunks and then ran them through her hand grinder into a bowl of water that had some powder mixed in that kept the ground up beets from turning brown. What the powder was, I don't know. I just remember that it came in a can like McCormick spices did. It was a tall white can, but that was all I remember. Sorry I can't be of more help.
@@dablakh0l193 , I'm the curious type, and when I read comments that I find interesting, I try to learn new things.
I believe we've lost so much concerning knowledge from the ways people used to make do with common, or even uncommon things.
I do know that sulfur (of all things) is used in sugar production, but I don't know if home applications/methods used it as well as commercial companies.
You can never know too much of the old ways.
Thank you for the response, and your original comment.
Have a blessed New Year!
@@dablakh0l193 Remembering from my mothers days in the kitchen in the 60's and 70's my guess would be that the powder could well be citric acid. It was commonly used in jams and preserves to stop the browning, and comes in a tall white can.
@@barnysadventures I was thinking the same think. And you can still get it at speciality jamming stores.
For your final products, honestly a pretty close result. One thing I noticed was during the centrifugal process, in my plant, it's washed while spinning with above-boiling water (held under pressure so it doesn't boil), that gives you the white sugar and helps spin off all the impurities. Molasses is actually a byproduct of a byproduct. And for full disclosure, I work at a sugar beet plant
I don't work in a sugar plant, but I think his centrifuge is set up wrong. It's basically a rotating strainer, that separates according to size, whereas a centrifuge is meant to separate according to specific gravity. So you need a slightly cone shaped can, and when it spins, the heavier part of the liquid climbs higher on the sides, and escapes first.
@@falcondark5338 I'm not sure on the geometry of our centrifugals but I believe they are just basic cylinders and layered screens. Fine enough where crystals won't pass through, but washings will. I have a Short I uploaded if you want to see it in action. Easier to see it that way
Would that plant be the one in Nampa, Idaho?
I remember in science class we used a jar with highly saturated sugar water in it with a string dangling from the lid into the water. After a few days in the window, the string started producing sugar crystals on it. You should try this with your creation and see if it makes crystals. Good luck 👍
That’s the way to do it I hope he goes for it.
Cool idea, see if the molasses and other contaminants are filtered out naturally 👍
Yeah it's a fun science experiment, did this to create salt crystals. It's really cool.
I’ve actually seen this in Middle Eastern stores sold as candy.
You have to supersaturate the water with sugar, by dissolving sugar in very hot water, so that when it cools, there's more sugar in the water than it wants to hold dissolved at room temperature
I'd love to see a Collab with NileRed to see if he could do better by having more experience
He's too busy making chocolate
They should make fancy chocolate together then
@@JD200_ Chocolate needs sugar, a collab would be helpful
Would like to see. 👍
Yeah let them Collab on chocolate with self made beets sugar.
Sugarbeets are quite common source of sugar here in central Europe. To be honest it is the first source I think of when it comes to sugar
my town of 6000 people in Belgium was known for making sugar from sugarbeets!
Yeah. Big in Czechia and Austria.
@@AnywhereMiami no? Belgium uses mostly beet sugar. I wouldn't call Belgium a poor country...
@@AnywhereMiamiI used to grow sugar beets in Germany.
@@AnywhereMiamiGermany and France are two of the biggest sugar beet producers in the world. Like in the top 5
If your sugar say "cane sugar" it can only be sugar cane. If it just says "sugar" it could be corn, beet, or cane, or a combination of those and a host of other sugars.
If you were ever to attempt this experiment again, there is a simple method to increasing the amount of sugar in root crops that has the added benefit of removing the bitter flavor. Leave your beets in the ground until after a frost or two. The plant naturally converts some of its starches into sugar to protect itself from freezing. I am convinced many of our root crops are supposed to be harvested in early winter before they freeze but after the cold weather sweetening has occurred.
My family actually owns a sugar beet plot!Beet sugar is extremely common in my country,and I've always associated sugar with beets instead of canes.We also use birch sugar but is consudered more "alternative".Up until I was 12 I didn't even know sugar could be made from different plants.
For a long time I kind of assumed sugar cane plants just grew ready made sugar crystals and they just threshed it and bagged it. And by a long time I mean until I was 30. In fairness - they do call it RAW sugar.
That's really cool, thanks for sharing!
by “birch sugar” do you mean xylitol? it’s actually an artificial sweetener, not sugar, but in my country it’s also marketed as “birch sugar”
Glad Lauren's still part of the team after the fire and rebuild. Hope we see her participating in projects again as things start to return to normal.
The sugar you made looks actually pretty legit, considering the tools used and it not being a "professional" set up. Historically there used to be huge variations/gradients in the quality of pretty much any ingredient, from flower to salt and sugar between what "peasants" and "nobles" used, where the work and cost invested would be vastly different.
Exploring these differences might also be an interesting avenue, though for food that might cross over with Townsends or Tasting History, but who knows, might be an interesting crossover to make different "products" and see what i.e. Max Miller makes of/with them.
I suspect your experiment was made extra hard by the small size of those beets. Sugar beets have many layers of meristematic tissue that are the cells that as the beet grows expand and store sugar. The number of layers is pretty much fixed. So a small beet doesn't have fewer layers, it has many layers that have not expanded and store very little sugar. I'd guess that most of the volume of your beets was contributing more to the impurities you had to remove than to the sugar.
But I agree, sugar beets are miserable things. I worked with them when I was a horticulture student at a university in a region of the country where many sugar beets are grown. The sugar content is ok these days but beets also have more protein in them compared to other sugar sources and that makes the refining process difficult. And as you say the molasses, without more refinement, has an off flavor. Much of it is used as a cattle food supplement. Cows love it.
That's why the sugar beets that grow in the fields in the town I live in absolutely massive? 😲😲
Cows love the beet tops too. We would also boil small beets with potatoes in an industrial pressure cooker for the pigs.
@@irissupercoolsy Yup. In a good year they get huge. And a lot of that volume is the sugar-rich tissue. If the northern part of the world had to grow it's own sugar crops sugar beets would be hands down the way to do it. But compared to sugar cane they are a distant 2nd place.
@@yumatom Agreed. Around here cattle get the beet tops, and the spent beets themselves once the sugar has been extracted. Nothing of the beet goes to waste, except the refined sugar, that mainly goes to the waist ;)
@@xlerb2286 I live in Belgium. So all beets, carrots, potatoes grow here wonderfully haha.
"We wont have sugar, we'll have caramel"
I see this as a clear win
When I was a boy, there was a huge sugar factory not far away. I still remember the distinct, quite pleasant smell of the process, which always started at the start of winter. To this day, that smell (which I haven't smelled in over 30 years) will always be associated with the changing seasons.
My dad was a sugar farmer and called it the smell of money lol
sugarbeet factories smell terribly so you probably witnessed sugarcane one
No. I have no other original recollection of sugar sources except beet. I've known this all my life. I found out sugar can come from cane or honey or other sources waaay later.
Depends on where you live. On the west coast it's all Cane sugar
@@nubreed13 The South, too.
This is very fun. I'm from Germany and my grandpa was a farmer who grew sugar beets. I have distinct memories of helping him to weed one of the fields he grew them on.
The biggest (or at least most iconic) brand of white sugar here has the word sugar beet printed on the front of the bag along with a drawing of a beet, so it's hardly an obscure fact.
Cane sugar is a speciality in Northern Europe
You could always add a crystallization and recrystallization step which could help with the consistency.
Using some lab equipment couldn't hurt.
I think even the primitive process of growing 'rock candy' from a supersaturated solution would work to mostly purify it...
We grew sugar beets at the farm i grew up at! It was so tasty. I loved eating them during harvest time. Raw, ofc! (Not in the US, though)
Also not in the US. When I was younger I used to visit my grandma in the village, during harvesting season she always used to put sugar beets into the furnace ashtray with skin on it, so they were slowly cooking, and even kinda caramelized inside.
I live in south-east Denmark, and I suspect you might be from somewhere nearby, as this part of the country is the sugar beet central of Scandinavia.
I remember when there was a Sugar factory in every major town, now there's only two left.
After harvest the sugar beets were left in big piles at the edge of the field, and as boys we used to steal a few to cut and eat 🙂
@@Aoderic From Denmark too. Remember a school mate had a sugar beet with him in his lunchbox and i had a taste. It was surprisingly sugary, like there were sugar crystals in it. (:
My dad used to grow these and rhubarb when we lived in NY. That was over 30 years ago, so I don’t remember much about it.
I tasted sugar beets on a farm here in Switzerland, and it was inedible. Sweet, yes, but also had an extremely unpleasant astringent quality that made your mouth tingle.
I live in Louisiana where we mainly cultivate cane sugar. But, I like how sugar is produced from different sources.
Beats are also used in sweet dishes, such as red velvet dessert's!
You should thank Napoleon, flooding the European market with affordable sugar. By 1806, cane sugar had virtually disappeared from the shelves of European shops because of the british. In 1811, French scientists presented Napoleon with two loaves of sugar made from sugar beet. Napoleon was so impressed he decreed that 32,000 hectares of beet should be planted and provided assistance to get the factories established in his Empire. Within a few years there were more than 40 sugar beet factories, in now today Northern France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Denmark. One of the many great thing the Emperor made in his life, he also wished to discover the new world and live in Louisiana.
Been around sugar beets most of my life. The beet flavor and other impurities are removed with milk of lime & CO2 reaction. They make the lime milk at the refinery, add it to the liquid, then pump CO2 through it. The impurities precipitate out with the lime. That leaves a liquid that's clean enough to start cooking down, etc. Michigan sugar is featured in a pretty decent video on here that details the process. This is the Bay City plant. Picking up a friend who works there is the closest I've been to that plant but I've been inside both the Sebewaing and Caro plants. I grew up in Caro and have delivered several hundred, if not thousands of loads of beets between the two plants, most of them at Sebewaing though. Michigan Sugar is pretty good about educating anyone who's interested about how the whole process works.
In Germany, beet molasses called Zuckerrübensirup is a staple breakfast food, usually served on a buttered slice of bread, like jam. You can also make delicious drinks or cakes with it, because it brings flavour along with sweetness :)
I think Dutch may have been leaders in this field
In the netherlands we have apple syrup, which is named that because it is partly made from apple juice, but the main component is actually beet molasses too and it's eaten in the same way.
The Germans created the sugar beet in silesia back in ye olden days.
So they may have been leaders in this field.
You guys are so happy. It makes me sick. LOL
Sugar cane is grown all over SW Texas and we have a sugar mill 2 miles from our house. Sugar beets has been used for hundreds of years in Europe.
Here in Australia, cane sugar is extremely common, while beet sugar is virtually unheard of and unused. We've the perfect climate for growing massive sugar cane plantations in Queensland, and as a child, I remember ash raining down on the town every year during the pre-harvest sugarcane field burnings. Bonus, we get access to honey-like golden syrup. Perfect as a binder when making tasty Anzac biscuits.
You can clean it up with a re-crystallization. Dissolve 3 parts sugar to 1 part water over low heat. Allow it to cool then drop in a few grains of already processed sugar to act as seed crystals. Once you get some larger crystals, break them up coarse and rinse with ethanol that is as cold as you can get it (think 190 proof Everclear that has been in a chest freezer on it's lowest setting).
Ice water is another option, but it dissolves sugar much more readily than ethanol, resulting in higher losses. Cold is the key, either way, as it slows the dissolution.
Someone has taken an organic chemistry 🧪 class
I've been watching for years and to see Andy going from "trying to recreate something" to succeeding and refining the methods is really amazing. Congratulations!
My grandmother lived in Essex. I stayed with her for holidays on many occasions, There was a local farmer growing sugar beet. At around 9 or so i got to 'help' with the harvest then go to the processing plant and see the crop be delivered.
I may also have been allowed to sit in the tractor seat as it harvested the beet but clearly I'm not admitting to that as it may not be technically legal.
Disclaimer: this was 50 years ago in the UK so things were different back then.
Look at any of the chemistry channels, you'll see purifying stuff is extremely hard. Getting from a natural-ish turbanado sugar (spun) all the way to a perfectly white sugar requires more than a centrifuge, it requires a great deal of filtration. Bone char is often used in that step, combining both the calcium carbonate and activated charcoal steps in one. But it likely only works on very large scale...
Beet sugar was a big deal in Utah for many, many decades. It was hard to grow up in my area without realizing its impact the U and I sugar company provided much of the area's sugar into the 1980s. And the beet plant that processed much of the sugar in the early days was just down the road from the towns I grew up in. The smoke stack is still there and know functions as a cell tower.
Feel free to contact me next time you are in the area and I will make time for a visit and tour!
hey neighbor! here in Idaho my grandfather retired well from one of their last factories in Nampa. it's actually still running to this day though I actually don't know who owns it. ever since I was a kid I've seen mounds upon mounds of sugarbeets being fed into that thing. it's quite an interesting process to say the least
They make vacuum blenders that remove the air before blending to help prevent oxidization
Sugar beets really made headway during the Second World War. My friends grandfather worked at a sugar beet factory in Canada during this time. They also stated growing them in England because of the blockades.
The rationing worked out to 8 oz per person per week. That is the recommended limit for sugar consumption now. Health improved very much during the war. Especially in England.
Before the war, thanks to the depression, many people were living on a high sugar, plant based diet. Diabetes was quite high. With rationing, if you could not afford the meats, eggs and dairy rations you got them for free. They knew they needed every worker and they needed a healthy work force. This was a short lived substity as everyone was soon employed.
Sugar was used in preserving, so not much was left over for sweets. Most people still preserved back then. Especially in Canada.
I grew up cooking from the Victory Cookbook from New Brunswick Canada. Also, the Canadian Cook book. Both use way less sugar than you would use in modern recipes from Canada. Also more blackstrap as a replacement.
I have noticed modern America Cook books use even more sugar than Canadian recipies. I don't have any old American cook books, but assume that once they entered the war, the recipies reflected the rationing.
I've been to a sugar processing facility. They do drying steps under vacuum so that it can be done at low temperature. Heating steps use jacketed vessels rather than electric so that heating is uniform heating rather than charring "hot spots" where the heating elements touch the cooking vessel.
What a fascinating journey. I love the DIY approach. It really brings the process down into an understandable process.
Man I miss the weekly uploads of how to make everything.. especially the ones that you get threw the early stages of how we used tools primatively
I lived for a few years in Billings, Montana. One big use of irrigation water from the Yellowstone River near Billings has been watering the sugar beet fields. The problem: the river water is very hard, very rich in minerals. After a few decades of irrigation, so many minerals have been added to the soil of the irrigated land that no crops will grow in it. Only a few salt-tolerant plants, usually considered weeds, can survive. No more growing beets or anything else useful.
Producing sugar from beets or cane would not be economically practical in the United States if there weren’t heavy taxes on imported sugar. High-fructose corn syrup would also be less attractive in food and drink manufacturing if imported sugar weren’t artificially expensive.
Sugar beets are fascinating, especially the history of how they came to be, but… I don’t know if they’re a really practical crop anywhere except due to political pressures rather than economic ones.
I really enjoy these intermittent diy/info episodes. It’s a pleasant change to the typical schedule. Also love the typical schedule!
The Sugar Beet molasses is for baking or on buttered bread. We use it for decades in Germany for breakfast. (since 1904 Grafschafter Zuckerrübensirup)
When I was a kid in Florida we used to chew on sugar cane stalks. We got them growing wild in wet areas and even propagated them to our backyard wet areas. Publix would also sell cane in the produce section. They may still do it in season. Sugar from cane or beets is the same thing after full refinement. But I believe in less refinement so we use a little bit of turbinado in regular cooking or to sweeten iced tea. I'm past having any kind of craving for sweets, so black coffee, plain teas, and bitter beers are my favorite drinks after ice water.
+1 for plain teas and bitter beers.
Really like this look at answering the question of, "can I attempt this without just primitive tech?". Think the only way this could have been better would have been something like a crossover with Nigel over on NileRed for the chemistry analysis of what's going on and what needs to be done to separate things.
Here in Australia where we farm a lot of sugar cane in the north, almost all of our sugar is cane sugar. It's interesting that elsewhere in the world other plant sources are used, namely beets and corn in the USA!
I like how the he introduces the topic by telling us how we probably have misconceptions about where our sugar comes from and then shows us some red beets and says that’s where it comes from.
Ive had sugarbeets as a kid and they were delicious. Got them fresh off a field too.
I could realy taste that they later get turned into sugar. Also the farmer told me a lot about it too which was so cool to me back then
"I could really taste that they later get turned into sugar"
So... the sugar tasted like sugar? I'm just not sure I understand what you're saying there... the ones you tasted _specifically did not_ get turned into sugar... if you're saying they tasted sweet in general, well, yeah, there's um... there's a bunch of sugar in sugar beets...
@@joshyoung1440 "ekchually"
Funny. We had sugar beats growing all around us, I once sliced one up expecting it to be super sweet and it was terrible. Like a Super dry taste I could not get rid of. The adults laughed at me and said there was a lot more to getting sugar from it than cutting it open.
yes a lot of sugar is from sugar beets but you can still go to any store and find pure cane sugar the best part is with the price of beet sugar it forces cane sugar manufactures to keep an equal price to be competitive . growing up in cane sugar heaven Florida I have always used domino sugar. also just a bit of FYI sugar beets need to be processed with in the first hour of harvesting if not they start loosing sugar . they respond like berry's and start to eat the sugar to keep the fruit or in the case of beets the root alive
All things considered it's pretty impressive that you made raw sugar and that it was THAT close to processed levels of white
Just the sugar in the raw itself is cool by my standards
Great video as always! You may find a pair of silicone oven mitts handy for future experiments that call for squeezing a hot bag - mine made doing BIAB (brew in a bag) beer brewing a lot nicer. They do double duty as regular oven mitts in my kitchen, way nicer to clean than cloth ones.
To increase the sugar yield of the beets wait until after the first frost to harvest. Also there is a two step process that is used to get the sugar out leaving the molasses as a by product that can then be reprocessed to get a lower quality sugar. The Thick Juice, what they make the white sugar out of, is also bleached with chlorine to get that crystal white color.
I work at a sugar beet processing plant, and can confirm, there is no chlorine used. Thick juice is boiled to speed the crystal growth, along with an injection of fondant (powdered sugar in an alcohol solution). After the boiling process, the, now called, White Massecute is dropped into batch centrifugals and washed with extremely hot water. Then cooled, dried and stored for sale.
For further disclosure, I work at Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative.
They might use a bleeding agent in the US, but in Europe they certainly don't. It's a 99.8% pure product, they keep it white by washing it in boiling water.
Molasses and brown sugar made from it contain vitamins and minerals and are more nutritious than white sugar.
Naturally but we pull so much sucrose by the time we make a molasses cut, that it's below food grade for people. Farmers usually buy it to spray over feed of some sort to sweeten it just a touch.
In Europe we use sugarbeats for our sugar because during the Napoleonic Wars the British blockaded mainland Europe preventing access to the American colonies where sugarcane was grown. So we switched to sugar beets.
When the war was over and the blockade lifted we kept using sugar beets because we already had those production chains setup and never switched back to sugar cane.
We also don't use corn syrup here, that's a very American thing.
Neighbor: Excuse me, but may I borrow a cup of sugar?
Andy: Sure, I have some homemade in my workshop.
So, a good centrifuge is worth the effort to build for a lot of reasons. The diameter of the spinning apparatus is actually critical for determining the amount of force you can place in the contents at a given speed. Centrifuges and ball mills are simple enough devices that you can build them yourself for most scales, but are actually super useful and awesome things to have.
Oh no, I definitely think of sugar beets. I thought that this was incredibly common knowledge? I remember getting some pure cane sugar from Thailand when I was a kid and being delighted.
Hey Andy, long time fan here. I really like this series and enjoy your journey through the ages. I was just wondering when you were going to show us how to make a horse? They were very important to the advancement of many societies and I've always wondered how we did it. Thanks! And keep up the good work :)
This was excellent and I’m really pleased with how your skills in processing and fabricating has progressed. I hope you feel proud of this, because you’ve come a long way and it shows :)
Where I am in Australia, it’s all sugar cane! Super cool to see sugarbeets
Sugar beets have been around and used to make sugar for many decades. As a teen fifty years ago we used to buy sugar beets to feed deer in the winter.
many years ago I visited a sugar beet factory in England, they said that at one point they could only make brown sugar until someone realised that adding a cup full of white sugar to the centrifuge once it had got up to full speed turned the whole batch white, and it was an incredible thing to see about one or two hundred Kilos of brown sugar suddenly turning white in the blink of an eye.
Well that's highly interesting. Do you know why it did that?
@@nerdy1701 It was to turn the brown sugar white
@@chrisdale5443 right. I understand what it did not how it did it.
@@nerdy1701 To be honest I don't understand how it worked either but it was impressive to watch
@@chrisdale5443 Fair enough. Pretty cool nonetheless.
most of your table sugar comes from sugar beets in the US. however just about 100% of sweeteners in processed foods is high fructose corn syrup.
I really enjoyed this, I didn't mind at all that you weren't doing primitive stuff. I want to see more!
If I recall, the whiteness from commercial sugar comes from processing through chemicals or bone char to further remove impurities.
This was great! I enjoy the whole "building up the tech tree" thing you've been primarily doing, but I'd love more of these deeper dives in topics related to what you've been exploring in the main series.
before dehydration you should try mixing in a little Irish moss. it is used in brewing to make sediments settle. also you can pour the acid solution that you use to prevent oxidation into the food processor so it doesn't oxidize in the container while you are cutting it up.
This was super interesting! Also I didn't know sugar beets were the same plant as the red beetroots. But is corn syrup really famous over there in the US? I don't think I've ever heard of it before, except maybe in this channel.
Unfortunately yes. I say it's unfortunate only because I have an allergy to corn and thus corn syrup.
Yeah corn syrup is in pretty much everything here in the US
Corn syrup is ubiquitous in American foods.
The US grows a ton of corn, it’s partially subsidized by the government. It’s hard to find anything without some form of corn on the ingredients list.
We grow so much corn we use it for everything we can think of, and some things you wouldn't think of.
Sugar beets are pretty much the basic sugar source in Europe. Cane sugar is pretty exotic over here and corn syrup basically non existent.
Yeah, it's geography. In the Western Hemisphere, there are places to grow cane in South USA, Central America, and South America. In the East, that zone is the Mediterranean Sea, North Africa, the Middle East... Not good climate for sugar cane...
Really fascinating! I wonder what an in between process would be like. Didn’t they make sugar cones because that somehow separated out the molasses? I’d love to try that one day. I’m all for chopping things in the food processor though!
Btw, don’t they do a bleaching step in commercial processing? Surely that accounts for the colour difference. The colour of yours looks about the same as unbleached cane sugar (we only have cane sugar here so I’ve never seen unbleached beet sugar to compare).
I have some sugar beet seeds and plan to try processing my own soon. Not sure I want to do your washing setup. That looked nightmareish. Maybe I’ll end up growing canes instead so I don’t have to deal with the beetiness.
Why it now makes our sugar? It's what white sugar's been made of for 60 years. I've known this since elementary school in the 70's. It literally states the sugar is derived from sugar beets on the packaging. I'd be more than a bit surprised if sugar cane would even be what comes to mind for the majority of people that shop for groceries in N. America over the last 50-60 years. Corn for HFCS, and beets for suga,r, has been common knowledge since the 50's and 60's when both industries started being heavily subsidized by the US.
Sugarcane based sweets taste great. The extra minor flavoring especially when you are using a more raw unpurified source of sugarcane sugar is wonderful in a ton of recipes. It's such a shame that big business focuses directly on cheap processed sugar instead, though.
I personally don't mind since it drives my resident state's economy here in Idaho. my great grandpa worked in the sugarbeet factory and retired well from it. it's good in my opinion that arable land here in a colder temperate zone can still be used for making sugar. sugarcane is typically only viable in subtropics or tropics, so it's a big thing for us here in Idaho. consider also that if a homesteader in the temperate US wants to make sugar themselves they need to grow sugarbeet and not cane and use a process like in the video, it's the option we have here up north and it works pretty well
@@brianjones9780 and you can always add cane molasses to beet sugar. (heard that beet molasses taste awful) the sucrose is the same anyways.
I live in the part of Sweden where the most sugar beets are cultivated. Southern Sweden, Scania, the city of Landskrona
East Anglia in the UK is a big sugar beet growing area. I've regularly driven past Wissington, Europe's largest sugar beet processing plant. Lit up at night it looks like something out of Blade Runner. I've also worked in Bury St Edmunds where British Sugar has facilities with big chimneys for the steam. It occasionally smelled like baked potatoes. In the UK sugar beet factories tend to work 24 hours a day between September & March(?). That includes Christmas Day. Hard to believe sugar beet & beetroot are virtually the same plant (much like the brassicas).
btw, squeezing the solids will yield you a ton of impurities. Less sugar yes, but a lot more additional stuff as well that wouldn't otherwise be washed off.
This title is a bit more clickbaity than i like.
Because nearly All of our sugar here in Europe (Germany for me) comes from Sugarbeets.
And many many people know that, for sure.
Oh, and also "we" celebrate the Sugar Festival in the Town Zeitz, called "Zeitzer Zuckerfest".
I know they use heat exchangers when processing them industrially. I was a heat exchanger tech for a few years. They would just hose the floor down with water and keep it wet to prevent the floor from getting sticky. I was walking through the office and piece of linoleum stuck to my boot when I was walking through.
HFCS being "most famous" is a very american phenomenon. I don't know of any other country that uses it in significant volumes, other than maybe in products imported from the US. Canada maybe?
The only reason US food manufacturers use it is because it’s dirt cheap there. And the only reason HFCS is so cheap there is because the corn used to make it is highly subsidized. :(
the process of cycling water over the beets is used often in chemistry. it's called soxhlet extraction. you can pretty easily buy the glassware that does this
It doesn't come from beets?
Separation. I always had trouble with this one too. It helps to think of paring. Great video!
Where does my sugar come from?
Beets me
(reads caption)
This mysterious source of sugar is the sugar beet, isn't it...
(watches video)
Yup.
Further north, sugar beets have long been the primary source of sugar. It's only in the past few decades where there's been a shift to cane sugar, mainly due to the lifting of tariffs and modern shipping making it so much cheaper.
I used to live close to one of the processing plants back when I lived in Idaho so sugar beets are the first thing I think of when it comes to sugar.
same!! there was one in Belgium in the town of 6000 people I lived in growing up
@@irissupercoolsy They have a unique smell don't they always seems stronger in the mornings especially if the weather conditions are right to cause fog.
@@DeathlordSlavik yes!!! haha. One month a year the entire town would stink
Where at? I worked at the one in Nyssa 30 years ago and my dad worked at it and the one that’s around Nampa or Caldwell right off the freeway.
@@currentliveoccupant The main one I think of is when I lived in Payette the smell from the one in Ontario would drift over in the mornings. Of course I also lived in Fruitland and Caldwell at different times afterwords so I still would regularly smell the sugar beets.
My father ran a highway construction business. He paved I75 thru Flint, Michigan. One night, after a large section of concrete was poured a bunch of local kids gathered up the sugar beets that had fallen off trucks. They threw the beets into the wet concrete. The next morning we had to take jack hammers to remove the sugar beets, them patch in the holes. They make great baseballs, but tend to explode when the bat hits them. Don't follow too close behind a sugar beet truck.
Lived in Europe for a couple years in my 20s and found sugar tasted weird there. Having grown up on cane sugar only, discovering beet sugar was a shock.
You could try to use the result as a sugar replacement on some desert and see if passes as normal sugar, great video!
Yum. New content smell.
Dwight Schrute approves this video.
Just wanted to add my voice to the great number of people here saying: this was great, and I'd love to see more like it!
Definitely don't need to worry about it not being full primitive tech, it was very interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed it, I'd love to see more videos like this where you tackle DIY'ing modern industrial processes. Really enjoyed this one, thanks!
not sugar cane or sugar beet? oh, i've been clickbaited. oh well, i'm here now. good job!
my family is from an area where sugar beet production and processing is very common. whenever we go there to visit it always smells like sugar beets. very unique smell.
FACT: bears eat beets.
Shoot... In the US, if the package doesn't specifically state that it is Cane sugar, it is probably beets. I used to live near a sugar factory that processed beets... quite odorous in the summer. But you have to dry out the fibre at the end of the process so they can cart the waste product to the local pig/cattle farmers.
Why isn't this on the history channel
Because they care more about aliens that they don’t even know if they’re real
Cause it isnt history
Cause the history channel sux
Because Andy is a legend and History Channel isn't as cool as him. Actually.
They actually tried to make a tv show based on this on the food network and it didn’t pan out
Brita filters aren't just filters, they also chemically bind to various molecules that might be part of the surface of a bacteria or virus like fats, proteins and sugars. Not surprised at all that you'd be losing enough sugar to notice.
Please be very careful with that drill press. Especially when you're using it for something it wasn't designed for, take some time to really think about what might happen when it starts spinning. You can hurt yourself really easily with it. Also, avoid wearing loose clothing that might get caught and pull you in. That includes long sleeves, hood strings, etc.
I have a book on sugar beet and its history. I can't find it right now. I have way too many books. However two tricks used in the field. Nitrogen atmospheres: all the machinery is in a box filed with nitrogen and no oxygen. This is not apparent to the untrained eye. It just looks like safety screens or screens to keep things clean. This prevents oxidation. Kilotons of nitrogen are used in the food industry to cook things without oxidation or burning.
Trick two is vacuum drying, the same process for milk products, and again its air free. The third process is well known. Double crystallization. Take the first pass product and add distilled water to dissolve then recrystallize with a pure seed grain of sugar. This leaves the impurities behind but requires very special conditions. I hope this helps with next years crop.
it doesn't come from sugar mines in easter island? shame
You could do a recristalization to purify the sugar. Disolve it in water or something, filter the solids, then recristalize.
You could recristalize using low solvent volume and temperature change, for example, or boiling off the exess.
Really bugs me that you showed Beetroots and a pack of white sugar giving the impression that the white sugar comes from Beetroots, you can probably make sugar from Beetroots but you make it from Sugar Beets like you do later in the video.
Makes the whole idea of the video seem like a clickbait.
Totally agree.
This is probably more my problem, but I bristled every time I saw the word "separation" misspelled on screen.
You weren’t alone. Plus “oxidization” instead of “oxidation”. (Yes, I know the first is also accepted at this point, but…)
Awesome, I've been hoping for a video about sugar refining for a while! I think this is a good way to intersperse some modern tools into the series--the part where you compared the "from scratch with modern equipment" to the commercial product AND the one you made with more primitive tools was super interesting. I agree with what Ch3zter said in a different comment, that trying the project with modern tools first may be helpful in knowing what to do with the primitive equipment.
When you're at the grey cloudy solution stage you might try using diatomaceous earth filtration. That's very handy for chemistry work where you can't get a solution clear, and food grade diatomaceous earth isn't expensive. Use a buchner funnel, and vacuum adapter. Put in filter paper, wet the filter paper with water, add a thin layer of diatomaceous earth, wet that and make sure it fully covers the bottom of the filter, add another layer of filter paper on top, wet that, and it's ready to use. It is FANTASTIC for catching the solids in solutions and leaving behind the material (in your case sugar) that's in solution. Orders of magnitude better than your brita filter.
Where I come from in the Imperial Valley of Southeastern California we have a Holly Sugar Plant that makes sugar exclusively from sugar beets. It is one of the bigest employers in the Imperial County if you count all the farmers and the people that work for them. It's a fascinating thing to watch the process in action.
Ever make Date sugar, dates are easily a favorite fruit, I've made syrup but making sugar would be a neat experience