Alcoholic Ginger Beer - input request

This is a link to a recipe that I've used before (when I started playing the home brew game) - http://www.netcooks.com/recipes/Beverages/Dave's.Ginger.Beer.html

Anyway, I tried it twice, and did chop and change certain things here and there. First batch basically came out Dry (I left fermenting too long), and very strong, and I needed to sweeten when serving. Second batch, I kept an eye on, and bottled when I hit my target FG to keep the sweetness, which was much better - but did result in bottle bombs

Anyway, I've been looking at ways to adapt the recipe, as I think it is in the right sort of place in principle, and wondered if anyone had any thoughts/tips/pointers. I'm looking at knocking up a trial batch this weekend, and was thinking about the following (measurements in metric to avoid confusion):

4.5 litres of water
150g ginger root, coarsley chopped
350g sugar
1 lemon
1/5 tsp. cream of tartar
1 packet champagne yeast
½ Habenero Pepper

Boil water.
Squeeze and add lemons.
Add ginger and cream of tartar.
Add sugar & Pepper.
Simmer for 20 minutes.

Pour everything (including the bits) in to fermenting bucket.

Allow to cool to pitching temperature

Dissolve yeast as per pack instructions, then pitch.

Leave to ferment dry in bucket with lid on (no airlock), giving it a good stir to degas regularly given that the PH is likely to already be fairly low with the ginger and lemon.

Rack to secondary (4.5 litre demijohn with airlock), regularly checking for 7 days to ensure that all sugar has fermented out.

Plan is to then back-sweeten with an unfermentable sugar. I was thinking Splenda, as have heard that you need a lot of lactose to get a decent sweetness. Obviously I'll be looking to do this in small measured batches before scaling up. Then give it another 7 days to ensure that everything has mixed well, and sweetness is about right (not a lot that I can do if over-sweetened at this point though).

Bottling & carbonation:

You'll notice that I went for a low amount of sugar for fermentation - reason being that for 4.5 litres, calculations give the potential ABV for this amount of circa 4.6% - I don't want to go too strong, but is also does not take in to account the volume of sugars in the ginger, lemons and pepper (Googling says that ginger root has 1.7g of sugar per 100g and 2-3g sugar per lemon, but can't find anything for the pepper, but would guess next to none), so 4.6% should be fairly on the nose. I'll obviously be taking SG readings to confirm though.

Given that the champagne yeast should have an alcohol tolerance way above target, I was planning on priming the brew with 30g of sugar for the full 4.5 litres for carbonation before bottling in Grolsch style bottles.

Mature in cool and dark place for minimum 2 weeks.

Anyway, this would only be my 5th brew ever, so I'm still fairly new in the world of home brew, so as I say, thoughts/tips/suggestions would be greatly appreciated to try and perfect.

have you considered using a ginger beer plant (GBP) instead of yeast? it's far tastier, easier to control fermentation, does not need clearing, is infinitely reusable.
i recommend this place in the uk for purchasing a strain for 16 quid (i got mine from them and i love it):
http://www.retro-culture.com/ginger-beer-plant.html
you buy it once and use it for years, plus it grows and you can give it out to friends.

my personal taste is for ginger beer in the 5% sugar range (final product) for medium-dry or around 7% for medium-sweet. for 5% final i start with 7% sugar, and for 7% final i start with 10% sugar. also i never cook my ginger or lemon, but juice them both and in they go, that way the ginger really keeps its bite.
both ferment to around 1.5 % alcohol in 2 days, which is almost impossible to notice if you are a regular old boozer like myself. i then strain off the GBP, bottle carb and leave the bottles in the fridge, since i continuously make small batches (the beauty of the GBP!). if you want higher alcohol you strain off the GBP and then leave the brew to keep fermenting, it will carry on slowly to your desired gravity.

an alternative if you don't like fake sugars (i hate the taste of all i have tried) would be to ferment down to just above desired sugar level and then heat pasteurize the bottles when they are done carbing; i sometimes do this with ciders but haven't yet with ginger beer. i am planning to try it next week and can report back, and there is a sticky on the cider page all about the pros and cons of this method.

dinnerstick said:

have you considered using a ginger beer plant (GBP) instead of yeast?

ferment down to just above desired sugar level and then heat pasteurize the bottles when they are done carbing; i sometimes do this with ciders but haven't yet with ginger beer. i am planning to try it next week and can report back, and there is a sticky on the cider page all about the pros and cons of this method.

Click to expand...

Two methods which I am very unfamiliar with given my limited experience thus far, but both do make complete sense.

Certainly something which I think that I will have a look in to for the future for sure.

However, the GBP plant method does pose slight issues for my needs; I have previously knocked up Alcoholic Ginger Beer for for BBQ's and the like, and I have generally needed to produce fairly decent size batches for them, rather than continuously making small batches - plus the girlfriend is likely to see it in the fridge and decide to throw it out!

That being said, once I've read up a bit on it, I might become otherwise convince

Heat Pasteurizing sounds very good though, and certainly something which I think I will have a go at. I just want to try to get comfortable with the recipe first and foremost before necessarily looking to tweak methods to this degree. Perhaps something for me to read up about and try for my next batch.

Thanks for the input on not cooking up the ginger and lemon. Once again, something that I will look at for test variations. I've not had issues with the bite after boiling with the ginger before, but it may certainly negate the need to add a Pepper in to the mix to ensure that there is a good kick.

Will get back to you after reading up on GBP and pasteurizing.

Update:
Knocked the first bit up yesterday

OG reading was 1.036, so very low, but I am planning on taking this batch dry, then backsweetening with Splenda

Will keep you all posted

Oh, and yeast gervin wine yeast - GV10

Update:
SG 1.004
Taken out all the lemon, ginger and chilli.
Put in to 4.5 litre demijohn with airlock after adding 35 grams of Splenda to the mix. Dissolved Splenda in warm water before adding to mix.
Tasted trial batch to upscale the amount of Splenda.

Suspect that there is a little more fermenting to be done - hence airlocking.

Planning on giving it another week to let fermentation fininsh then prime with 30 gram sugar in mix then bottle.

Stupidly I forgot to take SG reading after adding Splenda, so just need to keep an eye on SG movements to make sure all fermenting done.

Taste was pretty good in line with a fiery Jamaican ginger beer. Alcohol not too strong. Should be in line with my target of around 5% ABV in the end. Should be great when fizzy and nice and cold!

Roll on BBQs!

Think will knock up a 25 litre batch in a couple of weeks if all turns out well, but will have to leave in fermenting bin then as not got enough empty demijohns.

Oh, and I gave the must a good stir a couple of times a day until co2 production died down in 25l fermenting bin with lid (no airlock).

dinnerstick said:

an alternative if you don't like fake sugars (i hate the taste of all i have tried) would be to ferment down to just above desired sugar level and then heat pasteurize the bottles when they are done carbing; i sometimes do this with ciders but haven't yet with ginger beer. i am planning to try it next week and can report back, and there is a sticky on the cider page all about the pros and cons of this method.

Click to expand...

how did the heat pasteurising work out by the way?

haven't opened the cooked bottles yet. i wanted to do a side-by-side tasting with the unpasteurized vs cooked but i drank all the fresh stuff! oops. thing is, it was my tastiest batch ever. the only problem was that there is so much gunk in my ginger beer (bits of ginger, lemon, whatnot), that normally just settle out, these conglomerated in the necks of the bottles while pasteurizing, so they look pretty weird, but i don't mind about that. were i entering it in a beauty contest i would filter out the larger bits before pasteurizing. anyways i will report back as soon as i've tried them, but i think they will be fine

Take it that you used the plant again?

Good drinks never hang about long!

I poured mine out of the fermenting bin in to a big pan through a fine mesh bag, so have removed all the "bits". I'm contemplating letting mine settle to rack off any excess lees - bit like you would for mead/wine, but suspect could lose some of the normal cloudiness... Any thoughts on that?

Sounds like pasteurising doesn't make it look it's best, but it's how it tastes at the end of the day though!

What sort of bottles did you use for pasteurising anyway?

the bits in mine are really tiny, residue from the juicer, i think i would need to filter through paper. which almost always results in a giant mess so i don't think i will go for that.
i bottle in regular beer bottles with crown caps, i know from trial and error the temp and time needed to kill an ale yeast in these bottles. i still don't know if these conditions kill all of the stuff in the gbp, but it's a few days later and the bottles are still intact.
a nice thing about the gbp is that there isn't a large amount of yeast in suspension, so you don't get the characteristic lees as with brewing yeast. there is a bit of cloudy stuff, some of which settles in the fridge, but i always mix it back in before pouring, more for aesthetics as i don't think it really affects the taste.
i bet even if you rack off the lees and it is pretty clear at bottling you will probably generate enough lees from the bottle fermentation to keep it a little cloudy.

whoops- hold the phone, i just opened a bottle and it was a total gusher. i didn't quite let it get cold enough, i normally leave things in the firdge at least overnight, but when i opened this guy (smartly over the sink just in case) it was everywhere. so i conclude that something in the mix of organisms that make up the gbp can handle my pasteurization conditions. instead of killing it off i gave it a nice warm bath. also it doesn't taste as nice as the raw stuff, which may be in part from a few days fermenting in the bottle, and it is really really cloudy, actually more murky than cloudy. it's not bad, perfectly drinkable, what's left after half of it gushed out, just not quite as good now. maybe i killed off the yeast and allowed something else to take its place. don't know
so i won't call this a huge success. on the other hand, pasteurizing ale or champagne yeast is tried and tested so that will work fine, i just don't know how it will affect the taste

dinnerstick said:

whoops- hold the phone, i just opened a bottle and it was a total gusher.

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Ha ha. Been there before, and can sympathise!

Main thing as you say is taste being ok, but sounds as though it may be an issue with GBP.

I use 1 litre grolsch type bottles, so guess I might have a problem with the rubber seal. Going to give this batch a go as planned for the time being, but definitely up for giving the pasteurising a shot at some point - avoiding Splenda!

I'm pretty sure that mine will still remain cloudy, and have had same issue in past of sediment settling in the fridge.

Probably will bottle next weekend, so will let you know how things go with the Splenda. I do have my reservations...

i have also tried to pasteurize cider using 750 ml grolsch-style bottles, the seals started to leak when the bottles heated up but they still held enough pressure to carbonate. it's tough to get large bottles up to a kill temperature though, and re-heating the water with the bottles in is a very bad idea (they go boom), so i stick to small bottles for pasteurization and keep the big bottles for dry sparkling cider

Right - definitely will give it a miss til I've got some proper beer bottles. Missus would go spare if I covered the kitchen in ginger beer!

got to change my mind again, i fridged all these 'overcarbed' bottles and carefully opened one yesterday after 5 days in the fridge, and it was perfectly carbed. so my New crackpot theory is that 1. the one gusher i opened was still warm and therefore overly active, 2. when i bottle i don't really mix very well so the last bottle gets much more of the sediment. last night i bottled a small batch in plastic (1.5 L into 3x 500 ml bottles), and the one that got the sediment is already hard overnight whereas the other two are barely firm. i thought the lees in my GBP batches was mostly chunks of ground ginger but i guess it contains a large population of little GBP lumps. so my overcarbed bottle was possibly an 'enhanced' bottle, and the pasteurization possibly worked.
or maybe not

Guys I make ginger beer also but have never tried the ginger beer plant. I use wine yeast and bottle in 2L soda bottles. No pasteurization is necessary this way. The recipe if anyone is interested is as follows:

Here it is not in any format. For a 5 U.S. gallon batch------

Ingredients:

1 &1/2 pounds ginger root (scrubbed of dirt chopped roughly/ about 1/2 to 3/8 inch cubes , skin on)
4 large lemons (sliced thinly, peel on, don't worry about the seeds)
2 limes (sliced like the lemons)
1 teaspoon cream of tartar (helps the sugar dissolve and God knows what else)
7-7.5 pounds of cane sugar (or a combo of cane sugar and brown sugar)
1 (5) gram pk Red Star champagne yeast or Red Star Montrochet yeast ( I prefer the Montrochet---)

Bring about 2 1/2 gallons of water to a boil. Take off heat and add your cream of tartar and sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar, put back on heat. Add the ginger and citrus. Bring to a boil and boil for 20-30 minutes. At this point I use a kitchen stainer to strain out all of the spent sliced citrus and ginger from boil and discard. Boil for a few more minutes and cool the wort. I just put the pot in ice water until it is around room temp. Pour into fermenter and top off to 5 gallons with cool water and pitch your yeast. Seal it up with an airlock. (You can actually use a 5 gallon glass carboy for this. It doesn't foam up at all like a malt beer does so you do not need that much headspace in your fermenter.)

Ferment at room temperature for about 10 days. At this point your beer will not be fully fermented (somewhere around 4-5% ABV), but that's what you want----to leave a good residual sweetness to your ginger ale/beer. You can leave it to ferment longer and it will get dry and still be good but w/ higher alcohol and less sweetness.

Now here is the trick to it. Siphon directly from your fermenter into sanitized 2L soda (PET) bottles. Seal them up and let carbonate (with what sugar is left in solution) at room temp. for a day or more. The beauty of these plastic bottles is that you can squeeze them to determine the degree of carbonation that has built up. (you can also crack the cap) When they "get hard" stick all of the bottles in the fridge. This actually makes most of the yeast drop out of suspension and ceases/slows dramatically the carb process. If you leave them out of the fridge longer will they blow up? I have no clue, but those soda bottles are pretty tough. Drink when cold just like soda with a kick. I like to put a fresh slice of lime in w/mine when I drink it with no ice to water it down. It is also excellent on ice mixed w/ Rum (a dark and stormy) or gin is great too. Oh------and if you shop at Sav-a-lot the ingredients cost about $8. Except for the yeast that I buy at the homebrew store for $0.65/pk.

hi hts. i also use plastic pet bottles (500ml) + fridge for pretty much all of my ginger beer, the pasteurization was an experiment that i don't think i'll be revisiting (although it works great for certain ciders). the plastic (almost) never explode, when they get overcarbed they just gush when opened and you lose anywhere up to 2/3 of the bottle as geyser-like foam ejection. your stuff sounds good. do try the ginger beer plant stuff if you ever get a chance, it makes a really unique drink
my recipe here:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f95/real-ginger-beer-how-much-alcohol-can-plant-tolerate-223086/

Ok, finally got round to bottling last night. Not got a FG for you as pointless as I forgot to take a reading after adding the Splenda.

Taste wise - well rounded but with a good kick from the chilli and ginger. Pretty smooth and clear.

You could taste the Splenda a little though. Not a lot, but think I want to find an alternative. Anyone used Sorbitol for backsweetening before?

There was a fair bit of lees settled, and I avoided siphoning as much as possible.

Primed with 30g sugar for 4.5l in a syrup solution. Bottled in clear 1l swing top bottles.

Leaving in dark at room temperature for 3 or 4 days before putting in fridge - although guess that shouldn't matter too much as it fermented dry. Might give it a couple more days though as temp has just dropped back a little in the UK.

Probably going to let this sit in the bottles for 2 weeks before trying it. Will post feedback then.

hts said:

Guys I make ginger beer also but have never tried the ginger beer plant. I use wine yeast and bottle in 2L soda .

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I made this great recipe for second time and think I improved it
Basically it tasted very bitter (maybe lemon pith) and not v gingery during boil. I read about and see that also Ginger & metal don't mix. The problem all recipes try to address is to stop it tasting of gingery water. Thus the lemons and sweetness to fill the 'mouthfeel'. Also most ginger flavors are volatile so boiling reduces pepperiness.
Here is alteration
For 1 gallon
Grate 1/2 lb ginger into glass bowl
Pour boiling water on. Steep, strain repeat
Add cup apple juice, juice 1/2 lime
2lb dextrose Dissolve in hot water
Pour boiling water into cup raisins/sultanas steep, add to ferment
Keep adding hot water to Ginger until vessel at 1gall. Check flavor.
Cool
Add yeast
this ve
rsion seems much more peppery than boiled and fuller feel and no weird after taste. Just a cool burn

Can't edit pictures but here are raisins mid ferment

Tastes great!
Maybe cut raisins back to half cup. Added campden tab at pitch to kill any nasties from Ginger or raisins. making more asap

Last year for a friend's engagement party, I made a batch of Bier Muncher's C3C (https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f62/cream-three-crops-cream-ale-66503/ ) and added 2 pounds of fresh ginger. One pound at 30 and the other at 10. I think. I'll have to check my recipe at home.

It was one of the best beers I made last year.

B