REAL Ginger beer

[tusca]

Ginger beer, I've done lots of research not a lot of recipes, most are for non-alcoholic.

so I made one up and this is what I did.

4kg white sugar.
100g fancy molasses.
1 pound ginger peeled then juiced.
2 lemons juiced.

Spices, wrapped in cheese cloth and steeped for 20mins
nutmeg
cardamon
cloves

4tsp yeast nutrients
irish moss
yeast ec-1118

bottle conditioned white granular sugar.
turned out pretty good I used too many cloves though, need more nutmeg. mabye honey and brown sugar next time. but girls seem to love it. anyone else done anything similar ?

 

[kyral210]

Can you tell us more about the technique?

 

[Dauntless]

Sounds pretty good, did you backsweeten this at all or did it finish fine?

 

[tusca]

I took 4 liters water put it into my pot brought the water to a rolling boil added sugar and molasses, boiled for 40 mins then add spice bag and irish moss. boil for another 20mins. then just like beer cool wort, add to primary add water to 20-23 liters get temp under 80 pitch rehydrated yeast.

In primary for 2 weeks rack to secondary 2 weeks, bottle conditioned 3 weeks. I would use some yeast energizer next time. the primary fermentation slowed drastically after 4 days. final grav was floating around 1.01

I did not back sweeten, to me it seems very sweet but leaves your mouth dry, sparkles like ciders. seems to me the molasses left behind many slow/unfermentables. not sure as I'm still a noob have about 10 batches under my belt

bottled and corked. yum 1 tsp sugar per 750ml.

hope this answers everything.

As far as quantity of spices, well just like I cook I eye balled it and used my sniffer to get the taste I wanted. I kept smelling the wort as it infused into it, once it smelled very fragrant but not overbearing I pulled the spice sack

 

[Jif]

What ABV are we talking about here?

 

[tusca]

around 4.5%

 

[Dauntless]

I might give this a try when i get a primary freed up. Something to have ready to bottle when I get back from the holidays.