Ginger Beer

Made a ginger "beer" tonight and am a bit excited to taste it. I formulated the recipe based on several in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. Brewing it up was extremely easy, hopefully it turns out pretty good. Here's the recipe I made for a one gallon batch:

1.5 oz. fresh grated ginger
1 oz. cream of tartar
1 lemon, juice and zest
1 lb. turbinado sugar

Bring a gallon of water to a boil. Turn off burner and add all incredients. Stir well to mix, then cover and allow to steep until room temp. Strain into fermenter, aerate and pitch yeast.

Interestingly, I'm using the wyeast trappist high gravity yeast for it since I was stepping up a starter of it tonight so added about a pint of the decanted starter to the ginger beer to get it going.

What does the cream of tartar do?

YooperBrew said:

What does the cream of tartar do?

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The author, Stephen Buhner, says it's used for head retention, which I can sort of believe since it's used as a stabilizer for meringues sometimes. I think it is probably also used to add a bit of acidity to what might otherwise be a "flat" tasting drink. It was in almost every ginger beer recipe in the book, so I decided to include it, although I felt that it might be redundant to the lemon, as far as the acid contribution was concerned.