Ginger Beer

[arturobandini]

I picked up some root ginger today and thought I would have a bash at making some ginger beer....

Recipe -

500g Root Ginger - grated
500g Unrefined Cane sugar
Juice of 1 large lemon
Teaspoon of chili powder
Teaspoon of yeast nutrient
Teaspoon of Tannin
1 sachet of wine yeast.

I grated the 500g Root Ginger into a sterilised pan (overkill I know seeing as how I was boiling the mixture but I had the steriliser all made up anyway) and topped up with tap water. Once the mixture began to boil I added the 500g unrefined cane sugar and waited for it to reach the boil once more. When the mixture started bubbling up the teaspoon of chilli powder was thrown in and the heat reduced to a moderate simmer for about 20 minutes. The pan was removed from the heat and allowed to cool and infuse for about half an hour.

The mixture was then poured into a 1 gallon glass demijohn with a good amount of the grated ginger flowing through (about 25%) into the vessel. It was topped up with cold water and the lemon juice and Tannin was stirred in. The demijohn was then corked and shaken to buggery before pitching the rehydrated wine yeast into which I had just added the yeast nutrient.

The original gravity was 1030 at room temperature and it's been airlocked now and in the fermenting cupboard. I wasn't too fussed about the alcohol content as I thought it would most likely drop under 1000 I didn't want a 7% or above monster on my hands.

Any thoughts anyone?

[WishboneBrewery]

sounds good to me...

[arturobandini]

After a slow start ( I find dried wine yeast needs a day to get going if it's not made in a starter) this has started bubbling every second or so. Not as quickly as the mead which is firing on all cylinders. I'm already thinking to throw some apple juice on the yeast slurry of this batch once it's fermented out.

[will]

I've been working on a ginger beer recipe of late and what I've found is that generally it comes out far too dry. The problem is that you want it both sweet and fizzy to really enhance that ginger flavour, but it usually comes down to a choice of one or the other. You either arrest the fermentation early with campden tablets and end up with a flat drink or ferment out, prime in bottles and end up with a fizzy but dry drink.

The only way around this I've found is to bottle and drink before fermentation has stopped. But obviously you run the risk of explosion.

Here's the quantities of my last batch (which didn't prime too well):

500g grate ginger
500g spray malt
250g unrefined granulated sugar
1 lemon (juiced)
6 whole cloves
4 cardamom pods
1 tspn chilli flakes
15g Fuggles hops
Young's lager yeast

The flavour and alcohol content were spot on (maybe a touch too bitter, so may drop the hops down to 10g). But unfortunately due to a mistake in priming it was both flat and dry Still drank the lot though, so couldn't be that bad

Keep us informed on how your batch comes out, Arturobandini - I'm really wanting to nail a recipe and start making top-notch ginger beer. Maybe we could work together? I've been keeping a reasonably detailed log of my experiments.

[arturobandini]

Spraymalt you fiend!

I'm anticipating a dry drink as I don't have the facilities to force carbonate anything at the moment. I suppose the ideal would be adding the Campden's at the correct level of sweetness then racking it to a Cornelius Keg or similar and dissolving Co2 into the Ginger Beer. I've been reading up about non-fermentable sugars and as far as I can tell the artificial sweeteners could work to sweeten the drink and still allow bottle priming. I was very pleased with the all important heat of my brew in it's rawest form before I diluted it. I kept aside a class of the concentrate and mixed it with soda water and whisky and it was pure fiery goodness.

I had a snifter of the dilute ginger beer in the demijohn when I checked the original gravity and it tasted a lot mellower. I'm hoping the grated ginger in the demijohn will be imparting more heat and flavour over the course of fermentation. If the drink needs some pepping up at bottling I'm think about dissolving the priming sugar in with some powdered ginger to get more gingery flavour into it. There is also the possibility of chili bombing the bottles with dried/fresh chillies or chili powder!

I've only made 5 litres this time but I'm intending to experiment across a range of 330ml bottles with the above methods and work towards getting the perfect brew for me. I erred on the side of caution with the ginger at the start of the recipe as I'm supposed to be making this for others too and not everyone wants their head blowing off with Ginger flames like me.

Fermentation is starting to slow now so i'll keep you updated on the progress.

[will]

I've noticed the ginger-ness differ from batch to batch, despite using the same amount and method. I guess the quality and type of ginger does differ, even if coming from the same source, so it's pretty hard to control!

I had thought about artificial sweeteners, but they're generally full of nasty stuff that I would avoid in commercial products. I like to keep my brews as natural as possible. Aspertain is the Devil! I was hoping the spray malt would have kept some residual sweetness due to the maltose. It gave it a slightly more beer-ish character and certainly improved the head retention, which wasn't that undesirable.

Force carbonation with a CO2 injector I hadn't consider! I have a pressure barrel with an S30... I might try it. But then again I don't like the idea of putting sodium metabisulphite in to arrest fermentation

The best batch I did wasn't fully fermented, I bottled after about 5 or 6 days, refrigerated and drank after about 2 or 3 days. It was sweet, pretty fizzy, but very light. Ideal for a summer picnic, but not so much for a winter warm.

Do you boil up the ginger, strain and then put in your FV? Have you considered leaving the ginger in for the primary before racking off for a secondary? I might give that a go for my next batch - it may alleviate the slight wateriness of my last batch.

[arturobandini]

I boiled up the grated ginger with the sugar yes. I then let it simmer for quite awhile hoping to release all that gingery flavour. I then let it cool to room temperature before decanting into the demijohn. I pushed a load of ginger through into the demijohn for primary fermentation in the hope that it would continue to impart flavour to the brew after I found it a little weak after diluting it.

I know what you mean about artificial sweeteners as I personally wouldn't drink anything with aspartame in it. Lactose seems the tried and trusted method of adding sweetness to a brew but in the thread in this forum it's said that it doesn't give a complete sugar sweetness. Experimentation is the key! If I can nail down a good recipe then I'll definitely be sticking to it and maybe upgrading the batch size. Ginger Beer is a good one to experiment with as the 500g of Organic Root Ginger and the 500g Organic Unrefined Cane Sugar cost £1.20 to make up 5 litres.

[will]

Definitely. Keep me posted on how your batch turns out! I'm sure between use we could nail the recipe. I feel inspired to get a batch on now...

I'm going to try Safale s-04 for the next batch.

[flytact]

You guys are making ache for a tall Dark and Stormy on the boat!
I'll be keeping my eye on how this one turns out as well.

[DREADSKIN]

likewise lads. let us all know what your end result is

[arturobandini]

Yikes.
It's fully fermented now down to .990 from 1.030 so around 5.3% ABV. Tastings from the trial jar indicate some good heat and nice gingery taste. Fairly dry too but my main concern is that is thin, thin, thin. I added a teaspoon of tannin but perhaps I should've doubled or tripled that as it has the body and mouthfeel of water! My next experiment will involve more tannin and perhaps a couple of litres of grape juice. I'll likely reduce the sugar in that version to get a similar abv.

Let's see how a few weeks in the bottle will affect it but I think i'm chalking this one down as ginger water.

[will]

Fairly dry too but my main concern is that is thin, thin, thin.

This has been my experience a lot also, but I have to admit that the longest I've let a batch mature is around two weeks. I can't imagine that the maturing process will give it much more mouthfeel. I do think the spray malt improved things though

I've never used tannin in any of my batches, although I use tea in my TCs. One for the next lot.

I was thinking about going down the grape juice route too, but then what you have is wine that is flavoured with ginger and not really ginger beer. I think it would be detrimental to the taste that you'd want from a ginger beer.

I've been considering using a basic mead recipe as the basis for my next batch, but the drawback is the long maturing time. I've got to move house in June, so don't have the time.

[will]

BTW was in Lidl yesterday picking up ingredients for a TC and noticed they had some artificial sweetener in. Looking on the back it was 97% maltrodextrin and 3% aspartame AFAIR. As maltrodextrin is regarded as pretty safe as a sweetner and non-fermentable (correct me if I'm wrong) I reckon it might be worth popping-in at the secondary or priming stage of a GB to counterbalance the dryness and thinness... What do you reckon?

[arturobandini]

I know what you mean about the ginger wine and possibly dme is the best way to go to get that body we're after. I wasn't intending to make a pure grape juice and ginger mix but hoping that a couple of litres of grape juice would give it some body.

[will]

I know what you mean about the ginger wine and possibly dme is the best way to go to get that body we're after

Don't get me wrong the batch with the spray malt in was still watery