GInger beer

Started some ginger beer yesterday but after considering all the costs - sugar / ginger / lemon / yeast - would it not just be easier to but some Old Jamaican or Supermarkets own brand and add Beer Yeast??? would you need to add more sugar?

or have i totally missed the point as to homebrew and should make it yourself!!

stuff like this is usually a means to an end rather than a great recipe so don't worry about it :p

you could use old jamaica but it has preservatives...

Preservative (Sodium Benzoate) ,Stabiliser (Quillaia Extract)

I think stabiliser is fine, Sodium Benzoate can probably be boiled off but maybe somebody else knows more.

The fiery ginger beer isn't particularly good, I would take the cooper's kit over it any day :thumb:

If you brew up a standard supermarket ginger beer, assuming the preservative lets you, then you'll totally change the taste, the yeast will convert the sugar to alchohol, so it will go from sweet to dry.

My suggestion is to brew up the fiery ginger beer, in a one gallon quantites, and 'play' with with the amount of sugar to add and the point to add stabiliser, wine stabiliser will stop the yeast fermenting and leave some sugar in the solution to maintain a level of sweetness, to suit your taste.

Personally, I love the fiery ginger beer, 2 kilos of sugar in 25 litres, and fermented out really, REALLY dry, but that's my taste in ginger beer.

The whole idea of home brew is to make what you want to drink, just a case of learning how to do that, and this place has the epxertise you need for that, just ask :)

I've been getting into Ginger Beer recently.

Beginning with old CJJ Berry book recipe involving a ginger 'plant' in a jar being fed every day with sugar & ginger powder for 8 days
This gets strained and diluted in sugar water and lemon juice, and bottled immediately for 7-10 days.
I like leaving it another week or so but I make sure I pop the corks about once a week to avoid unpleasant surprises.
it all works nicely giving a delightful drink which is sweet and fizzy with more body and depth than a soft drink.
It's a thirst quencher but I also want a more serious supping drink with real fire and more booze.

So I tried a more serious fermentation for a week in a DJ
and back-sweetening & priming, like the popular classic Fiery Ginger Beer recipe
on the Wine/Cider forum.
I've found that if I try to brew ginger root, I get sulphurous smells coming off it from about day3 of ferment.
The end product can be pretty good all round but this sulphur really ruins it for me.
I'm trying the same technique with ginger powder replacing the root to see how that turns out, since I love the powder-based softer one.
I do think the quality of the burn is better from the root but as I say the smell is a deal breaker.

Someone pointed out that not all ginger root is the same; maybe my supermarket ginger is already ruined by months of storage or something.
I could try NOT hard boiling the root and remove all the root shreds before the first fermentation.....

Anyone got any sage advice on this to save me repeating known experiments?