But it’s standing upright! :rolleyes:
Seriously, looking at my Golden Syrup ingredients and I have no idea what they mean by inverted. What’s that all about?
If it’s totally inverted it’ll all pour out… no wait.
What a question! I found this list of sugar types… and this explanation on how invert sugar resists crystalization (bad for liquids), while still being soluble enough to taste sugary.
This page gives an overview on how to invert sugar. From what I can gather, it has something to do with changing the polarity or handed-ness of sugar.
What I can’t find is why this inversion happens, and why you’d want to do it in the first place. Aw… I give up. 80% of what I’m finding has to do with university chemistry lab experiments determining the “optical rotation” of sugar. Which still has something to do with it, but I don’t know what. Who knew pancakes would require a chem degree? 
Table sugar is a made up of a molecule of glucose connected to a molecule of fructose by something called a 1-2 alpha glycosidic bond. The 1-2 describes which parts of the molecules are connected, and the alpha describes the geometry of the connection. When you take a solution of table sugar, and break the glycosidic bond, a little acid is all it takes, you end up with a molecule of glucose, and a molecule of fructose. This mixture is sweeter than the origanal sucrose solution, and is called invert sugar.
First off, realize that the term “Sugar” represents a class of compounds containing hundreds, if not thousands of different molecules. When most people say sugar, they are really talking about “sucrose,” which itself consists of a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose (fruit sugar).
“Invert sugar” is made by breaking the bond between the two sugars, yielding a mixture of free glucose and fructose:
Sucrose= (Glu)-(Fru)
Invert Sugar= (Glu) + (Fru)
Where (Glu) and (Fru) represent a molecule of glucose and fructose, respectively.
Many sugars are anomeric-that is, they rotate polarized light. Sucrose rotates it in one direction. The mixture of free glucose and fructose resulting from the hydrolysis of the bond between the two sugars rotates polarized light in the opposite direction; The polarization is “inverted”- get it?
Oh yeah, refering to the OP, I’d guess that the reason it’s called “partially” inverted syrup is that the hydrolysis process was not carried to completion.
bizzwire: Two molecules are ‘anomers’ if they differ only in the arrangement of atoms at the ketone or aldehyde position. a-D-glucose and b-D-glucose are anomers. A molecule that will rotate polarized light is simply ‘chiral’ or ‘optically active’.
According to a table of optical rotations I found in a biochemistry exam on the Rutgers website, the optical rotation (under standard conditions) of sucrose is +66.5°. The optical rotation of glucose is +52.8° and that of fructose is -92.0°. Add these together, and we would expect invert sugar to have an optical rotation of -39.2°; thus the optical rotation has been ‘inverted’. Partially inverted sugar would have an optical rotation somewhere between -39.2° and +66.5°, and you could determine the extent to which sucrose had been hydrolyzed into glucose and fructose by measuring the optical rotation of partial invert sugar.
Owch!!!; hoisted by my own petard. Roches is, of course correct. My stupid; I was gonna talk about ring opening/closing around the aldehyde but realized that it was immaterial to the OP, the term anomer was a vestige of that.