I've made a couple of different ginger beer brews now, but wanted to try something different this time. Warren had emailed me his Super Secret recipe, that he's been using to cook up some nice brew over in the 'States. Apparently it's nigh on impossible to buy a proper brewed ginger beer over there! No ginger beer, no Bundy - why would ANYONE live there??? :)
No one seems to make ginger beer these days like we used to do when we were kids. I remember having a ginger beer "plant" (the yeast), that you'd keep in the fridge in a jar covered with gauze. It was always a big deal. We'd mix it up in big buckets, then pour it into 2L soft drink bottles in the laundry. After a couple of days, they'd start exploding, and you'd suddenly feel like drinking some ginger beer every time you walked past.
Maybe that's why no one does it that way any more!
Being a proper recipe, we needed some ingredients.
Being a good husband, I sent Jess to the shops with a list. :)
Warren's recipe was set up to make 10L of brew. But I have a 20L fermenter, so we decided we would simply double everything. Unfortunately, the first step involves cooking all the various ingredients in together. And our biggest pot wasn't big enough. So we did it in two passes, and poured it all into the one fermenter when finished. It took a bit longer, but should be the same in the end!
It doesn't look the most appetising at this stage, but it smelled divine! Looking back, I think we could have done with cooking it all a bit longer. We followed the recipe to bring it to the boil and then simmer for 20 mins, but I think our simmer was a bit too low a heat. I think either simmering it higher, or cooking it longer might have unlocked some more ginger flavour. We'll see how it goes, and alter the recipe for next time if we need to.
After everything was cooked, we simply tipped the wash (ginger bits and all) into the fermenter, and filled it up with another 16L of water and added the yeast. It's been bubbling away in the shed now for almost a week. It's not been brewing too quickly though, which is good, so we'll just keep an eye on it, and bottle it only after it's finished it's primary fermentation. To bottle it too early will result in explosions!
I've still got all my beer-brewing equipment, so I can test the specific gravity of the wash to determine when it's finished fermenting. We'll bottle it into some brown plastic 700ml bottles, which are worth their weight in gold. No longer do you need to worry about glass exploding, or smashing bottle caps onto the top of the glass with a hammer to seal them - simply two glucose drops, fill the bottle with ginger beer, then screw on the lid, same as you would a 2L softdrink bottle. Much, much easier! Plus, if you do get it wrong and they ferment more in the bottle than they were supposed to, they don't explode! They just expand out into a huge ball!
This batch should be ready for a taste test in about 2 weeks from tomorrow, which will have it just in time for Christmas. Trev is already planning to spend Christmas day drinking Dark and Stormy's - ginger beer with a shot of rum. Although I'm not sure he's factored in the alcoholic content of the ginger beer! I'll let you know how it turns out!
