Sorghum Syrup

From Sorghum bicolor

Sorghum syrup comes from the stalk juice of sweet sorghum, specialized varieties of the same species grown for grain (grain sorghum).¹ The juice is heated, clarified by skimming, and concentrated into a syrup; because it tends to run higher in invert sugars than cane juice, it resists crystallizing, so syrup rather than sugar is the natural product.¹ The finished syrup is light brown with a distinctive pungent character layered over its sweetness, often described as molasses-like.²

Sorghum was domesticated roughly five thousand years ago in Africa and reached the United States in the 1850s.³ During the Gilded Age Americans promoted it as a temperate substitute for tropical cane, sparking what food historian Deborah Jean Warner calls the “sorghum rage” — a wave of books, government support, and syrup making that ultimately conceded the crop could not compete with cane or beet sugar.⁴

Today the syrup is mostly a southern and midwestern product, but it has a genuine Vermont thread. A 1990s SARE project demonstrated that sweet sorghum syrup could be made commercially in Vermont, with boils yielding 25 to 30 gallons and roughly 7 to 8 gallons of juice needed per gallon of syrup.⁵ John Williamson of Shaftsbury, the state’s lone syrup maker for decades, grows Della, Sugar Drip, and Umbrella sorghum, plants in mid-May, and processes for about a week each October, crushing with a tractor-driven mill and boiling in two 30-inch flat pans over a wood fire on an old sugaring arch.⁶ His juice runs about 17 percent sugar, versus roughly 2 percent in maple sap, and he draws the syrup off near 228°F.⁶

That concentrated, high-sugar juice makes sorghum syrup a capable fermentation substrate, which is how it shows up in this notebook: sorghum syrup kombucha uses it as a stand-in for refined sugar, and the bright, citrusy early ferment turns sulfurous if pushed too long.