Ginger Wine to ginger beer?

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koomber

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I've just started a ginger wine recipe and a rough back of the fag packet style calculation shows that the ABV should be about 10-11% Give or take. If I'm right though this won't be enough to kill the yeasties.

So I was thinking, if I bottle these in beer bottles, could I charge it with a little sugar and make and fizzy ginger wine? A super stong ginger beer. Possibly a Ginger Fear? I like the sound of the idea myself :)
 
sounds tasty :p and it depends on the type of yeast you used it may kill the yeast... i liek to use a champagne yest for various types of wines and it usually has a kickass around 15 16 ?
 
Might need to age it out for a bit longer than usual to let it smooth out.
 
Sounds interesting.. How did you do the ginger wine? I have a 35# box of candied ginger at home that I'm trying to decide what to do with.
 
I make ginger wine all the time. It's fairly easy. I slice up about a thumb of fresh ginger and use 2.5 cups of sugar in 4L of filtered water. I pitch in a half a pack of EC1118 wine yeast and let it ferment for about 3weeks - 1 month. You can filter it or let it be. If you don't use an actual ginger beer plant (which can only tolerate up to 5% or so alcohol levels) and use the wine yeast instead, the alcohol content get ups to 10-14%, but you'll have to add some citric acid or lemon juice to taste. The ginger beer plant contains a bacteria that gives the ginger-beer a real bite and nice flavor without any additives, but the only draw back is the low alcohol tolerance. Here's a recipe using a plant http://thegingerbeerplant.com/FAQs....ng it would work out fine. Have you tried it?
 
If you don't use an actual ginger beer plant (which can only tolerate up to 5% or so alcohol levels) and use the wine yeast instead, the alcohol content get ups to 10-14%, QUOTE]

Wine yeast instead of the ginger? What happens after 5% abv to the ginger?
 
If you don't use an actual ginger beer plant (which can only tolerate up to 5% or so alcohol levels) and use the wine yeast instead, the alcohol content get ups to 10-14%, QUOTE]

Wine yeast instead of the ginger? What happens after 5% abv to the ginger?

You may be confusing "ginger" and "ginger beer plant". Ginger is the spicy root we all love. Ginger beer plant is a symbiotic mass of mold, yeast and lactobacillus bacteria that forms a jelly like substance. It is much like kefir grains as a fermenting agent or the consistency of mother of vinegar. These symbiotic colonies like kefir grains and ginger beer plant seem to always have a low ABV limit of about 3% - 6%.

I have never made ginger beer but ginger mead is very nice. I used 8 oz per gallon of fresh ginger root and it made a very nice mead. I have it at about 13.5% ABV but it took it just about a year to really mellow out and get super good.

To the OP:

Yea priming and carbing up the ginger wine may be good. I mix my still ginger mead with a bit of carbonated water for a nice kick. But I think the mead does best at a gravity of around 1.01 or higher. So give it a taste before priming and you may find you need to back sweeten to just over the perfect taste, then let it carb up and pasteurize to stop feentation.
 
Great advice, thanks!


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I made this ginger wine recipe, and it turned out great, only thing I did different was use champagne yeast which gave it a nice fizz.
 
when I saw this, I was thinking "Stones Ginger Wine" which is a fortified wine with high sugar content and like 13% alcohol. I guess that is in the realm of home brewing without distilling.... does anyone have a recipe?
 
when I saw this, I was thinking "Stones Ginger Wine" which is a fortified wine with high sugar content and like 13% alcohol. I guess that is in the realm of home brewing without distilling.... does anyone have a recipe?

I have recipes someplace for it. I did a bunch of research earlier this year and have 2.5 gallons in my MR Beer Keg waiting for me to finish the process. I took different ideas from different recipes and discussions all over the web and merged the best ideas and info.

But basically you make a ginger wine, I think I used Jack Keller's Recipe Except I used a lot more ginger than he calls for... I loves me some ginger.

Then I'm going to kill off the yeast and back sweeten it and then "fortify it" at bottling time with a probably a pint of ginger brandy, the amount I used is going to depend on the gravity of everything combined, to hit the abv of stones.
 
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