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greggreg66 · 06-23-2012, 05:01 PM

Today I decided at the last minute to brew a ginger beer. I didn't have much grain, just the dregs of a 25kg sack, but I figured this was enough to make a beer so I just went for it!

The last ginger beer I made was only OK, it was 2 kg of ginger, a load of sugar and some lemons and that was about it. Needless to say it was fiery & bitter, needed a sugar syrup upon serving but it ended up okay once sweetened loads.

So I had only 3.5kg of maris otter left and I also threw in about 350g of caramalt (why... because it was to hand)

I wanted to try brewing a simple AG beer but instead of adding any hops I'd add ginger. So, instead of the 60 min bittering hops I used 1kg of finely chopped ginger. Another 500g at 30 mins and a further 500g at 15 mins. So no hops were harmed in the making of this beer.

For some reason I managed to over egg the batch sparge so had quite a lot of wort left from that. I ditched it because I couldn't fit anything more in my boiling pot.

The OG was kind of low at 1.038, but I knew this would happen because of lack of grains to hand. Doesn't matter though, hopefully it'll be quite quaffable and light so I think I actually prefer it that way.

I've only recently got into yeast washing and I used a yeast I washed a few months back so I made a yeast starter (for the first time, I kind of freestyled it with sugar boiled/cooled water). This is the 3rd time the yeast was/is used, I think its Safele S-04. Maybe.

Looking forward to tasting it!!! Will post more pics when its fermented etc.

greggreg66 · 06-23-2012, 05:05 PM

The ginger in the 2nd photo is the 1kg 'bittering' ginger.

The other photo is of the mini yeast starter 'krausen' (if you can call it that?). I hope that's a good sign as its the first time I've done a yeast starter!!!

Oh, and after brewing I treated myself to a homebrew stout.... then went online and ordered a Blichmann Beer Gun to make life bottling a bit easier. Hope its worth the £££!!!

More pics here...

greggreg66 · 06-23-2012, 05:06 PM

Oh and I also juiced 4 lemons + zest of one (couldn't be bothered to grate the rest!)

barrooze · 06-24-2012, 12:55 AM

Sound great to me.

I've only brewed one Ginger Beer, but it was kind of similar to what you did. I scaled up the recipe from Strong Waters and got an OG of 1.039. I also used S-04 on mine, and it was wonderful. I hope yours turns out really nice!

greggreg66 · 06-24-2012, 07:32 AM

Cheers Barrooze. Hopefully it'll turn out good then! I had the idea a few days ago then saw other people on HBT talking about replacing hops with ginger so thought I'd give it a go too. Not used a GBP yet maybe I'll look into that too.

greggreg66 · 06-29-2012, 08:19 PM

I'm about 6 days in, just had a preview taster from primary (I can never leave a beer alone

). At the moment its 1.010 so I can't imagine it'll go much beyond that, but maybe it will. Anyway, at the moment the taste is quite thin upfront, but there's a perfect amount of ginger heat following up and as an aftertaste. Its obviously early days for this beer, but if with time the thinness hopefully gets some body from conditioning but the heat stays, I think this beer will be great! And at about 3.7% ish, it'll be a nice light summer ginger beer!

Happy so far....