I'm going to be brewing a 5gal batch of winter warmer at the upcoming Mash Occur at JQ's house, and I'm thinking of spicing it up with ginger and pure honey
I'm thinking about a pound or two of honey, but am not sure how much ginger I should use ... I've read everywhere from a couple grams to 16oz lol. Anyone have any experience with this?
Yeah - the grated fresh variety is best for this. An ounce or two will give you enough flavour to balance with others... I would lean towards 2oz since the WW is very rich in flavour to start with, and you'll need that much just to taste it. when I made ginger beer I used a lot of ginger (two pounds or more, sometimes).
Also, would you suggest honey at the end of primary? ... I'm thinking 1.5lbs of honey after signs that fermentation is slowing ...
I've never tried that, but my instinct is that you're not going to gain anything versus adding it before primary. Dissolving the stuff cold is a right pain in the ass at any rate.
My technique is to add the stuff after flame-out, immediately before whirlpooling and cooling. Reason being the heat and whirlpool dissolves it perfectly, and you don't steep it for long enough to lose significant flavour/aroma.
I'd say it's time for an experiment ... I'll try it this time at flameout, and my next batch I'll add at the end of fermentation.
From what I read you don't want to boil the stuff and alot of the flavour and aroma from honey gets blown off during a vigorous primary fermentation. I say this based on this beersmith article I came across the other day:
http://beersmith.com/blog/2009/09/05/brewing-beer-with-honey/
I'd rather just add at flameout and see how it turns out
I've used ginger a number of times. I use approximately 2 grams or 1 - 2 teaspoons of fresh grated ginger. It gives me a very subtle taste that is hard to identify if you didn't know what it was. I prefer that you cannot easily identify what the spice addition is... as soon as you can tell "ahh that's ginger" you have added too much.
Honey I also use a lot... 1.5 to 2 pounds is a good amount to give you a bit of body and barely noticeable taste.
Yes, add both at flameout.
Yeah, I've read a whole bunch on Honey - I think I was actually ranting on here some months back regarding a dodgy advice column in BYO. You don't lose significant aroma via fermentation blow-off, it's much less volatile than say... hops. By all means experiment away, but my hypothesis would be you'll see very little difference :)
Never boil honey - flameout (once things have stopped boiling) only.
steve's right re: the ginger too... however I suspect with other stuff going on in a WW if you're after even "barely detectable" you'd need about a quarter of an ounce at least.