A sugar thread

[mbanu]

Certain styles of tea expect sugar, so I thought a thread on sugar might be nice.

One of the biggest improvements for me was realizing that sugar absorbs flavors and aromas the same way that tea does, so removing the sugar from paper packaging and getting it into something else as soon as possible helps, as the paper does not protect it and tends to add its own flavor over time.

Even though they are the teabags of sugar in some ways, I quite like sugar cubes, I think because there is no worry about clumping or using desiccators like with loose sugar, even though this means that sometimes I find myself in a spot where the tea needs some amount more or less than a cube. Apparently the sugar cube was invented in the town of Dačice in the Czech Republic, which used to be home to a beet-sugar factory; they have a monument there commemorating the event.

[mbanu]

I think with sugar the best thing is to start at the end in the teacup and work backwards, because the sugar industry can be confusing when starting from the start. For example, here is a map of the sugar industry in the United States, from the lobbyist group The Sugarcane League. Florida, Louisiana, and Texas are sugarcane growers, while the other shaded states are sugarbeet growers. There are states that grow sugarbeet but have no factories to refine it, states that don't grow any sort of sugar that have a refinery, states that grow sugar and have sugar mills but not refineries, etc. So vertical integration where a state has a complete self-contained sugar industry seems rare, making it hard to ask about Louisiana sugar vs. Texas sugar, for example. On the other hand, it is much easier to ask about sugar cubes vs. kluntjes, two different formats of sugar someone might use in their tea.

[mbanu]

Island nations tend to have a more centralized sugar production process due to being islands, although here again there is no guarantee that everything is happening in the same place. Usually the big pressure is that because of limited space there is limited economy of scale on many of the islands as far as sugarcane growing goes, so their sugar industries are usually struggling or have been eaten up by the rum distilling business, so it is hard to tell what is up and running and selling sugar.

Jamaica might be a good example. In Jamaica there is Frome, which is run by Liu Chaoyu as part of Pan-Caribbean Sugar. They used to also run Monymusk and Bernard Lodge, but I believe these were sold, and it's not clear to me what happened to them after that. (It looks like the land under Bernard Lodge is being sold as real estate, so it likely permanently closed.) Sometimes you can find Pan-Caribbean sugar for sale, so I think they are still exporting from Frome.

Other than Frome, there is Appleton which I think is vertically integrated into the rum distillery, Worthy Park (also rum), and Golden Grove.

Supposedly Jamaica no longer has the facilities to make white sugar, so Jamaican sugar will be one of the brown varieties.

[LeoFox]

Wow interesting how some mass tea companies like Davids teas sell their own sugar

https://www.davidstea.com/us_en/tea/roc ... loEALw_wcB

[mbanu]

Wow interesting how some mass tea companies like Davids teas sell their own sugar

https://www.davidstea.com/us_en/tea/roc ... loEALw_wcB

It's interesting that they have mixed several types together, it looks like. Rock sugar is popular for use in East Frisian style black tea (on the north coast of Germany), although I think they usually will use just one type of rock sugar.

[Ethan Kurland]

In my lifetime I have seen sugar trade mostly around a few US cents per pound, often as low as 2 - 2 1/2 cents a pound while sugar traded commercially at 22 1/2 cents a pound in U.S.A. in accordance with our laws. I believe this started when Cuba became a communist country & the USA began its embargo in response. (After President Kennedy had sent his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, out to buy many boxes of Cuban cigars which the President smoked daily.)

The five American states that do most of the farming to produce sugar would punish their Senators if they could not protect this price of 22 1/2 cents so any sponsor of a bill to lower that amount would make an enemy of Senators of sugar-producing states. This fabricated & noncompetitive high price helped lead to great subsidization of corn farming to produce corn syrup that is cheaper than sugar. Some people believe corn syrup is metabolized differently than sugar & is more likely to lead to diabetes than sugar. (Corn syrup certainly ruins soft drinks for me.)

While people discover real reasons for them to use various sugars (coconut, date, etc.) or other sweeteners or buy agave or whatever which tastes bad to them or is unpleasant for them somehow; businesses observe what is paid for those newly popular sources of sweetness; retail prices for cane sugar get raised by these greedy & astute observers. (Often in sneaky ways, price remains the same for a bag or box; the sizes of the bags & boxes get smaller.)