Did you know?

About sugar

• A grain of sugar under the microscope is a translucent crystal, reflecting light from its 14 facets like a jewel

• In the late 16th Century, a teaspoon of sugar cost the equivalent of ten pounds in London

Sugar and medicine

• Sugar helps heal wounds. Sugar has been used for centuries to successfully aid in the healing of wounds. Sugar dries the wound thus preventing the growth of bacteria

• Pharmaceutical manufacturers use sugar to grow penicillin

Sugar and work

• Film stuntmen use bottles and plate glass windows made of sugar

• Sugar hardens asphalt. It slows the setting of ready-mixed concrete and glue

• Sugar is used in leather tanning, printers' inks and dyes and even in textile sizing and finishing

Sugar and people

• A pinch of sugar on the tongue is a traditional remedy for hiccups

• A spoonful of sugar added to a vase will prolong the life of freshly cut flowers

• Babies are born with an innate preference for the sweet taste

• Our great grandmothers used sugar to starch their petticoats

• Sugar is brain food. Sugar, and carbohydrates in general, are converted to blood glucose - the fundamental fuel needed by the brain

Sugar and food

• A teaspoon of sugar after a hot curry will extinguish the furnace in your mouth

• During World War II only 4oz sugar was allowed to be bought per person per week as part of the rations

• Sugar caramelizes under heat. Caramelization gives cooked vegetables a pleasing taste, colour and aroma. Sugar in glazes and sauces provides caramelized flavors for cooked meats

• Sugar has been an important food ingredient for centuries. Experts place the origin of sugar in the South Pacific about 8000 years ago

• Sugar helps foods brown. When bread is toasted or cookies are baked, sugar combines with proteins to produce the appetizing brown colour and pleasing aromas

• Sugar inhibits mould and yeast growth. Sugar increases the useful life of jams and jellies by binding the water needed by mould and yeast for growth

• Sugar makes nutritious foods tasty enough to eat. Just imagine what healthy foods like oatmeal, grapefruit and bran muffins would taste like without a sprinkle of sugar

• Sugar softens acidity in foods. Sugar improves the taste of salad dressings, tomato sauces and many other acidic foods by balancing their tartness

• A 4g teaspoon of sugar has just 16 calories

How do plants make sugar?

All green plants make sugars.

They take up water and minerals from the soil through their roots and carbon dioxide through their leaves.

Leaves contain a green substance called chlorophyll (this gives plants their characteristic colour).

The chlorophyll uses light energy from the sun to combine carbon dioxide and water to produce sugar.

The by-product of this process is oxygen.

The term used to describe the process by which plants make sugar is photosynthesis.

It comes from the Greek word ‘photo’ (light) and ‘synthesis’ (putting together), so in simple terms plants use light to join water and carbon dioxide.

As a result of photosynthesis the sugars glucose, fructose and sucrose are produced. These are then stored in the plant. Sucrose is the sugar most commonly extracted from plants by man.

Only sugar cane and sugar beet make and store enough sucrose to make it worthwhile for us to grow, harvest and extract sugar from them.

The family of sugars

There are a whole range of substances which make up the family of sugars. These include the sugars made by plants during photosynthesis, milk sugar and honey.

Our bodies use all sugars in basically the same way, whatever the source, to give us energy for life.

Sugars and their sources

Glucose: fruit, vegetables, honey
Maltose: barley
Sucrose: sugar beet, sugar cane, fruits
Lactose: milk
Fructose: fruits, honey

Sugars - the building blocks for plants

The sugars produced by photosynthesis provide an immediate source of energy for plants to live and grow. Excess sugars can be stored as sucrose. This provides an energy reserve at night, when plants cannot photosynthesise.

Sugars are also used as building blocks for making all the other substances which plants need for growth and repair. For example, sugars can be used to make complex substances (dietary fibre) which form plant cell walls and provide the plant with structure and support.

Glucose can be used by plants to make starch which is made up of long, branched chains of glucose. Starch is found in large quantities in potatoes, rice and cereal grains (eg wheat).

Sugar Futures Poised For Strong Rebound

Sugar futures present a buying opportunity – at least, those for distant delivery, which could see gains of some 25% given the damage to production prospects provided by current prices at three-year lows.

New York's October raw sugar contract on Tuesday hit 15.93 cents a pound, the lowest for a spot lot since June 2010, depressed by decent weather for harvesting cane in Brazil, the top producing country, and growing it in second-ranked India, besides by a round of producer selling.

"The drop was also attributed to the Brazilian real weakening against the dollar, which encouraged producers to sell the dollar-denominated commodity to alleviate currency loss," Joyce Liu at broker Phillip Futures said.

The decline has been felt throughout the futures curve, with the March 2015 lot, for instance, setting a contract low of 17.47 cents a pound on Tuesday.

Clear deterrent

However, even if pressure remains on prices short-term, "as we approach the peak of the Brazilian Centre South crush and as the Brazilian currency continues to weaken", investors may be too gloomy over long-term prospects, given the incentive that low values are giving to producers not to invest in output, Macquarie said.

Even the values of March futures are below costs of producing sugar, which the bank estimates at about 18 cents a pound for Australia and Thailand, and 20 cents a pound "if not higher" for India and Europe.

Brazil's average industry breakeven costs rose above 21 cents a pound in 2011, but have since retreated to about 17.7 cents a pound thanks to the depreciation of the real.

"We think this will be a clear deterrent to producers from investing in further mill expansion," Macquarie analyst Kona Haque said

Beet vs cane

Indeed, given the need for a strong incentive to attract investment into cane mills and a crop which takes some three to reach its full potential, "prices need to stay 5-6 cents a pound above costs of production for a sustained period before new investment can take place", Ms Haque said.

Indeed, producers of beet, an annual crop for which area can easily be switched to grains, "will be the first to respond to the negative price trend," led by Russia and Ukraine, "followed by other high cost producers".

Former Soviet Union growers have already cut back on beet sowings, with consultancy Ikar forecasting an 18.9% drop to 3.85m tonnes in Russian sugar output in 2013-14.

Market trend reversing

While annual world sugar production has grown some 9% since 2010-11 to an estimated 179.1m tonnes, "at today's prices it is questionable whether we can repeat such a strong supply growth", Ms Haque said

Output growth, which has already more than halved below 3% from levels of the past two seasons, is still to fall to about 1% by 2014-15.

With demand expected to rise by 2.4% in 2014-15, encouraged by stockpiling at low price levels, the world will fall back into a production shortfall that season of about 2m-3m tonnes.

"With the market trend now reversing into one that is tightening, as opposed to loosening, we would expect prices to respond," Ms Haque said, foreseeing prices ranging from 19-22 cents a pound in 2014-15.

"This is clearly much higher than the 17.8 cents a pound currently priced in the futures forward curve."

Exploring the Secret of Indonesian Sugar

In 19th century, while Indonesia was being a colonial state, it was golden year for sugar mass export to Europe. Billions hectares sugarcane field were created by colonial government and private sector, hundreds tons of sugar were shipped to Europe. Locomotives, big machines, workers, technologies, seeds, etc., are focused on the sugar industries. Sugar factory was big and huge, set up on hundreds hectares area.

You can see black and white portrait of the factory in the Sugar Museum, located on the Gondang Baru Sugar Factory, Jawa Tengah. All photos of big sugar factory display here, from small city such as Tasikmalaya until big Colomadu Sugar Factory in Solo. Big old machines are set up in the corner of the exhibition room; it's a heavy machine, part of the sugar kettle which not use now. I'm wonder, how to move a small heavy things to the museum? Probably it's more than 200 kilograms.

If you pass away on the Klaten-Jogjakarta Street, please keep on eye to a big factory alongside the street. The building has big yard, looks like oldest than the neighborhood, sometimes you can see smoke out from a big flue inside. The museum located on the east of the sugar factory. It was built in 1986 in order to celebrate 19th International Society of Sugar Cane Technology. On the yard, you can see an old locomotive, named simbah or old man. It's the old locomotive, made by Germany in 19th century. The loco isn't use now in the fabric, because it needs woods as their fuel, whereas the price of wood is very expensive. The newest loco uses solar as its fuel. In the harvest season, you can see loco taking hundreds tons of sugar cane from the field southern the fabric.

How do plant sugar cane? Does it need any special handling? Or just left behind? You can see how to plant it on the sugar museum, unnecessary to go to the field, just watching, reading and let your imagine control your knowledge. Take a moment, to a short trip of planting sugar cane on the museum. Drawing, photos, tools, which are displayed on the museum, will lead your questions become invention. You can learn how the steam machines

Inside the fabric, there's an old steam machine that still use until now, made by French in 1884. People said that the highest quality sugar is produced by the old steam machine. If you want take a trip on the inside fabric, the best season is on the harvest time, on May-July, that all the machines are ran to produce sugar. You can see how human and machine working together to change sugar cane into sugar.

MUSEUM GULA JAWA TENGAH
Address.
Pabrik Gula Gondang Baru
Jalan Raya Jogja - Solo Km. 25, Klaten, Indonesia
Phone. +62 272 322328
Opening Hours. 
Monday - Thursday & Saturday at 7.00 am - 2.00 pm. 

Friday at 7.00 am - 11.00 am

Sunday at 8.00 am - 12.00 am

How Cane Sugar is Made

Growing the Cane
Sugar cane is a sub-tropical and tropical crop that prefers lots of sun and lots of water - provided that its roots are not waterlogged. It typically takes about 12 months to reach maturity although the time varies widely around the world from as short as six months in Louisiana to 24 months in some places. Where it differs from many crops is that it re-grows from the roots so the plant lasts many cycles [or 'ratoons', a word derived from the Spanish to sprout] before it is worn out.

Harvesting
Sugar cane is harvested by chopping down the stems but leaving the roots so that it re-grows in time for the next crop. Harvest times tend to be during the dry season and the length of the harvest ranges from as little as 2 ½ months up to 11 months. The cane is taken to the factory: often by truck or rail wagon but sometimes on a cart pulled by a bullock or a donkey!

Extraction
The first stage of processing is the extraction of the cane juice. In many factories the cane is crushed in a series of large roller mills: similar to a mangle [wringer] which was used to squeeze the water out of clean washing a century ago. The sweet juice comes gushing out and the cane fibre is carried away for use in the boilers. In other factories a diffuser is used as is described for beet sugar manufacture. Either way the juice is pretty dirty: the soil from the fields, some small fibres and the green extracts from the plant are all mixed in with the sugar.

Evaporation
The factory can clean up the juice quite easily with slaked lime (a relative of chalk) which settles out a lot of the dirt so that it can be sent back to the fields. Once this is done, the juice is thickened up into a syrup by boiling off the water using steam in a process called evaporation. Sometimes the syrup is cleaned up again but more often it just goes on to the crystal-making step without any more cleaning. The evaporation is undertaken in order to improve the energy efficiency of the factory.

Boiling
The syrup is placed into a very large pan for boiling, the last stage. In the pan even more water is boiled off until conditions are right for sugar crystals to grow. You may have done something like this at school but probably not with sugar because it is difficult to get the crystals to grow well. In the factory the workers usually have to throw in some sugar dust to initiate crystal formation. Once the crystals have grown the resulting mixture of crystals and mother liquor is spun in centrifuges to separate the two, rather like washing is spin dried. The crystals are then given a final dry with hot air before being stored ready for despatch.

Storage
The final raw sugar forms a sticky brown mountain in the store and looks rather like the soft brown sugar found in domestic kitchens. It could be used like that but usually it gets dirty in storage and has a distinctive taste which most people don't want. That is why it is refined when it gets to the country where it will be used. Additionally, because one cannot get all the sugar out of the juice, there is a sweet by-product made: molasses. This is usually turned into a cattle food or is sent to a distillery where alcohol is made.

Power
So what happened to all that fibre from crushing the sugar cane? It is called "bagasse" in the industry. The factory needs electricity and steam to run, both of which are generated using this fibre.

The bagasse is burnt in large furnaces where a lot of heat is given out which can be used in turn to boil water and make high pressure steam. The steam is then used to drive a turbine in order to make electricity and create low pressure steam for the sugar making process. This is the same process that makes most of our electricity but there are several important differences.

When a large power station produces electricity it burns a fossil fuel [once used, a fuel that cannot be replaced] which contaminates the atmosphere and the station has to dump a lot of low grade heat. All this contributes to global warming. In the cane sugar factory the bagasse fuel is renewable and the gases it produces, essentially CO₂, are more than used up by the new cane growing. Add to that the factory use of low grade heat [a system called co-generation] and one can see that a well run cane sugar estate is environmentally friendly.