ginger beer

[Cuba]

I'm not sure if anyone has ever heard of a mixed drink called a dark and stormy; made of ginger beer and dark rum, very good. Anyways you can't get real Caribbean style ginger beer here so I decided to make some.

Now I know that it isn't beer in the traditional sense; and most store bought ginger beer has 0% abv. But I received a book for Christmas about different fermented beverages (keifir, kombucha, sake, etc.) and I plan on doing small batches of a lot of them.

Here is my ginger beer recipe that I made by mixing a few recipes I found together:

~1/2 lbs peeled, minced organic ginger root
3 limes juiced, 1 lime zest
1/4 lbs organic cane sugar
1/4 lbs organic brown sugar
4 whole cloves
1 small cinnamon stick
1/4 tsp (heaping) black peppercorns
Pinch of salt
Pinch of ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp yeast (US 05)
Just over 2L of water

1. Boil water, reduce heat, add ginger and cool for 30 min.
2. Take off heat, add sugar, spices and lime and ingredients.
3. Let cool to pitching temp. then add yeast.
4. After fermentation stops strain liquid into storage container.

There it is, feel free to tell me what you think. I started an old clay growler full (~3L) on Sunday so hopefully it will be ready to sample this weekend.

I'm not sure if I should do any secondary conditioning with this. What do you guys think?

[jamie_savoie]

I think this could be drinkable after a week or two.  Personally I wouldn't condition.  What the target OG?  Is it going to be carbonated?  If yes, in bottles?

[robcoombs]

I think this could be drinkable after a week or two.  Personally I wouldn't condition.  What the target OG?  Is it going to be carbonated?  If yes, in bottles?

I agree with @jamie_savoie here, I would drink fresh. The flavor of citrus and spice will fade with conditioning.

[Cuba]

To be honest I didn't bother to take an OG, probably a rookie mistake ill regret haha.

The batch is so small and I plan on mixing with rum so the abv doesn't really matter to me this time round.

I wasn't planning on carbonating this batch. Ginger beer is usually only slightly carbonated anyways. I'll probably just drink this fresh/mixed with rum.

[Roger]

This sounds very interesting. I've wanted to do a ginger beer for quite a while. I agree with Jamie and Rob about drinking fresh however it would be interesting to see how it ages. I'd probably see how it tastes fresh then prime a couple bottles and see how it is after some conditioning.

[blisster]

Very interesting...  I've never brewed anything with half those ingredients so no idea how it would turn out or age.  Def would like to try it though 

I'm also guessing it wouldn't age too well but the only way to know for next time is to try both ways... I'd bottle some with a bit of corn sugar and taste after a couple of weeks/months to compare... Results might be surprising.

[Cuba]

For some reason I let this completely ferment, so I have a very acidic ginger beer with a relatively high abv. So I decided to bottle it and let it condition for a while to see if that helped.

I made a second batch and only let it ferment for about a day and a half. Taste excellent! Very sweet, almost too much ginger, nice bite to it. I decided to bottle this too... resulted in over carbonation probably due to excess quantities of sugars and too much yeast. Haha, so now I think the next step is to cut back on the yeast quite a bit and work on sediment issues.

[paulmaybee]

Hey Cuba, did you manage to get a Ginger Beer Plant, GBP going with this?  I'd love to try a real ginger beer too.  If you have some GBP, I'd love to do some kind of trade.

[Cuba]

I didn't even know such a thing existed @paulmaybee. I have just been using US05 so far, I will have to look into finding some GBP.

[paulmaybee]

I found a site from the UK that sells them.  I might try ordering some and then I can share once it grows a bit.