Advice on sweetening ginger beer

[Cally]

So, my first post here, and I hope it's in the right place, posting here as it's a question about sweetening which anyone making cider might be able to help with more.

I've got 22l of ginger "beer" fermenting away quite happily, made with a huge amount of fresh ginger, raw cane and caster sugar, and a 1.5kg can of light malt extract, yeast is US-05. OG was 1.056 and I'm hoping it will get to around 1.010 before I bottle.

I'll bottle in a mix of 0.75 and 0.33l bottles, when making beer I just add a sugar solution made using a priming sugar calculator to the fermentor, mix, and then bottle, never had any problems carbonating this way.

But, I'd quite like the ginger beer to have a bit of sweetness. I'm trying to decide if it's better to use stevia to get to the sweetness that I want, and then add the priming suger, or if I should add extra sugar and then pasturise the bottles before it all gets eaten up by the yeast/the bottles explode and destroy my box room.

I did make cider once adding extra sugar and then pasturising (in a big pot with water around 65 degrees), and it worked fine, but I've honestly forgotten how I did it in terms of timing. I'm worried about using stevia because of possible nasty aftertastes. I did consider just adding priming sugar and then (when I open a bottle) adding a drop or two of simple sugar syrup, but I'd quite like to give bottles as gifts and I don't want it to be "ginger beer some assembly required".

Any advice would be much appreciated, preferably without needing to go for any speciality ingredients (I live in the Czech Republic and it's not great in terms of home brew supply).

 

[johncrobinson]

I am glad you have beermaking experience so you know what can happen.

I dont know what stevia is.However i dont think in this case you should use sugar,The reason for this is you intend to give the bottles away to people who may not know they might need to be a bit carefull.
In anycase the beer would end up unsweetend again after a short while due to the yeast using all the added sweetening sugar.

I can sugest:>
Glycerine will take the raw edge off and is safe to add (Best option?)
Artificial sweetner will work but SOME types can leave leave an "aftertaste"
Lactose is another option its used in stout but i have no idea about if it will marry with ginger beer,and is not very sweet.

In Britain we can buy PLASTIC bottles from homebrew shops,They look the same as beer bottles but are safe if they burst.
Mink coats and Armani suits excepted.

 

[druid1966]

stevia...I read that somewhere...a few years back, but cannot produce the document.

 

[Cwrw666]

Stevia has a nasty aftertaste to me. I wouldn't use it.

 

[Cally]

Thank you all for the advice, in the end I used an artificial sweetener called Kandisin (main ingredient seems to be glycerol. Wasn't that happy about the ingredient it but the results were fab, didn't sweeten it a lot, just enough that it's not 100% dry. Carbonated with table sugar as normal and it's delicious, a little like a crabbies but not so horribly sweet (also went up to 7.3% which I wasn't expecting!)

 

[johncrobinson]

Hi Cally,
Glycerine is a natural fermentation by product so you have no need to worry about nasty "chemicals"

Glad your wine came out ok in the end.