by Nick H » Wednesday Dec 23, 2009 8:36 am
Hi everyone. My first post to the forum. I found this forum while searching for alcoholic Ginger Beer recipes, so I'd like to share my findings.
I really wanted to do a 'back to basics' GB and so I researched a recipe from a bloke in Canada-
1 kg ginger
1.5 kg invert sugar
3 litres boiling water
2 cinnamon sticks
1 chopped green chilli
4 whole lemons
Any strong beer yeast.
20 litres cold water
First of all, I grated the fresh ginger root and then boiled it with the sugar for about thiry minutes and poured it into a polybin and added the cold water. When it was cool enough I added the yeast. It started bubbling away in six hours perfectly. The original SG was 1070.
After eight days fermentation (with a warming belt because it's b****dy cold here in the UK) the SG was down to 990 and the bubbling had all but finished. I bottled it in the beer fashion with 2 teaspoons sugar per 2 litre bottle and left it three weeks before daring to open the PET. It took about ten days to pressurise the PET bottles, and when I opened the first bottle ten days after that, there still wasn't a lot of fizz. But the taste is pretty terrific with a good bite to the tongue from fizz and ginger. It tastes great cold, but it's absolutely dry without a trace of sweetness. It mixes well with vodka or brandy, but that wasn't quite the idea. It really tastes like a super concentrated, alcoholic version of Canada Dry. I'd call it a success!
What will I do different next time?
I'll increase the ginger root to about 1.3 kg and boil it a lot longer.
I'll also increase it to three chillis and add them to the boil
I think I'll increase the sugar to 2 kg. It will either increase the alcohol (unnecessary) or improve the final sweetness.
By the way, how do I calculate alcohol yield on this?