Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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So when I was living in Germany, it was really hard to get ahold of brown sugar of the kind commonly available in the US. Brown sugar does exist there, but its closer to this turbanado style sugar than what is commonly referred to as brown sugar here. So what’s the difference? Well today that’s what I want to get into, what makes these sugars different, and how they are related.

So lets start with what the heck is sugar even. Well sugar is a general term for a bunch of different types of molecules that all serve the same kind of purpose, typically when saying sugar we are referring to sucrose or granulated sugar, but the term is actually extremely general and can also refer to other things such as fructose, lactose or a bevy of other things.

Sugar is a carbohydrate and is a great way to store energy. In some plants like sugar cane, or sugar beets, the amount of this stuff is pretty high, but maybe unsurprisingly it’s actually present to some degree in almost all plants. But I guess not strictly limited to that, apparently, sugar was found in a meteorite from 2019.

In sugar cane, date palm and sugar beets the sugar concentration is high enough to make it worthwhile for going through the complicated process of extracting it from the plant material. The process for how this sugar is extracted from the plant material will give us our answer on what exactly makes brown sugar brown. So let’s make some sugar

The process starts by getting the sugar-rich juice from the sugar cane or beets, this is typically done by milling, which crushes the cell walls and releases the juice. For the granulated sugar we are used to seeing, at this stage, the juice would be processed to remove the color by using carbon filtering along with some chemical processing. In brown sugar this step is not performed and so the final sugar crystals will have a brown tinge.

So the next step is to concentrate the sugar by boiling down the juice. This creates a solution that has a very high sugar concentration, high enough that the sugar will begin crystalization.

When doing this though, we not only increase the concentration of sugar, but also the other plant components that were present in the extracted plant juice.

Collectively, we can think of the component of plant juices as the molasses, where the sugar crystals are what we are after. Refining sugar is the process of isolating the sugar from the molasses. A purish version of sugar being what we typically associate with granulated sugar.
The sugar molecules will begin to crystalize around impurities or seed crystals introduced. The sugar crystals grow creating the little granulated grains we are used to seeing. However these crystals are still stuck in the syrup.

To filter out the sugar crystals from the sugar, a centrifuge is used, leaving mostly just the crystals. This process of centrifuging is performed on the syrup at least three times, extracting as much sugar as possible from the syrup.