Ginger Beer - continued

2 and a half weeks ago, I put on a Ginger Beer brew, hoping to have it ready in time for Christmas : Life in FNQ - Matto & Jess: Ginger Beer . Well, 2 and a half weeks later, it's still in the fermenter, bubbling away. The rate of bubbling has remained steady the whole time - 1 bubble every 10 seconds.

The problem is that the fermenting should only have take 5-7 days, maybe even less given the heat up here. So something's going wrong, and I suspect it's my method. When brewing beer, you want to leave it keep fermenting until a couple of days after it's stopped bubbling. This ensures that there's no sugar left in the brew when you bottle it. This is important, because when you bottle it, you add a specific amount of sugar to each bottle before capping. What this does is re-start the fermentation inside the bottle for a little bit, which produces CO2, which is what makes the bottle fizzy. If you bottle the brew before it's finished, then you end up with an unspecified amount of extra sugar in each bottle. which typically results in a large boom, and a shower of beer.

I'm thinking that, since Ginger Beer is generally sweeter than a normal Lager, I probably should have bottled it a week ago, since we would want some of the sugar to remain in the drink. The wash started off tasting wonderfully gingery, but has steadily lost flavour. It's still ginger now, but it's a very weak, watered-down ginger taste, as opposed to the strong, full-bodied knock-you-down-and-flog-your-wallet ginger taste it had when we first stuck it in the fermenter. So I think that's got something to do with it.

As for this batch, I'm not sure what to do with it. It's Christmas in a couple of days, so I've missed my chance to have it ready by then. Should I bottle it now and keep an eye on the bottles to see if they're looking like they'll explode? Should I cut my losses and just throw it out and start again? Should I use a Turbo yeast next time to try to ferment it quickly?

I'm not sure what I'll do at this stage. Probably just keep looking at it wondering when it will be ready for me to drink (which, lets face it, was the whole point of this exercise!). I'll try and bottle it in the next day or two though, and will see how it tastes after it's had a chance to fizz up, and once it's nice and cold. If you don't hear from me again after a couple of days, send the paramedics and the HazChem cleanup guys!