Fiery Ginger Beer

[Cellular]

I have trawled through a huge eleven year old thread here plus a few other sources and have come up with this recipe, thoughts?

for 23L
2kg ginger
2.5kg granulated sugar
10 tsp cream of tarter
juice and rind of 2 limes/lemons
4 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon hot chilli powder
1 tablespoon molasses
Ale yeast (leftover trub from a morgans kit)
48 sweetex (add at start so they dissolve and mix and any remains settle out)

A lot of ginger but it seems no-one ever regrets using too much!

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Personally I’d probably leave out the sweetex and just add a bit of sugar in it when serving it?

 

[RoomWithABrew]

I would try some monk fruit extract or eurythritol instead of the sweetex and experiment after the ferment so that you can work out the sweetness you want.
48 Sweetex is going to be roughly 2 a bottle, but they do have a recognisable tang.
I used cold pressed ginger extract in my last ginger beer, it has the juice of ten gingers in it ( I couldn't get a weight value from the suppliers for this figure ) . Saved a lot of work and it was cheaper to.

 

[Cellular]

depends on the size of your bottles! for my 500ml ones it comes to about 1 per bottle which I expect is going to be the bare minimum. I think we will probably sweeten to taste at serving as well but would prefer at least a bit of the sweetness from sucralose as it's a bit healthier (also dissolving sugar in fizzy drinks removes all the fizz and adding syrup waters down the flavour). Unless the ale yeast isn't going to get it down to FG1.000? Guessed it would as it's just straight sucrose?

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Fiery Ginger Beer Is not something i have ever tried but keep us posted as the subject is discussed fairly regularly.

 

[Cellular]

So I put this on as:

1.9kg Ginger
2277g Granulated Sugar
2tsp cream of tartar
2 Small Limes
1 tbsp Molasses (meridian)
about 0.4 tsp Hot Chilli Powder
Yeast leftover from a Beer Kit (Morgans)

OG 1.051 on 26/05/21.............FG 0.977 on 07/06/21

Chopped the ginger using the mandolin blade on the food processor then poured 2 kettles of boiling water into the boiling pot and left to sit for 20 mins. Strained this off into the FV which had the sugar in and then pouted 3 kettles of water back in to the boiling pot with the ginger. Boiled this for 30 mins then strained off. Repeated this process 2 more times until the juice coming off was clear. Topped the FV up to 23L with cold water. The molasses & chilli & cream of tartar were added direct to the FV. The lime juice and zest were added to the first boil.

Yeast pitched at 20.7 on 26/05/21, fermented at around 20-23degC

Tasted on 07/06/21 and it has a good initial flavour but lacks body. It's also too dry and will need sweetening. The obvious yeasty tangs as there as well as it's only a week old. Tried mixing with beer and not that great. Better mixed with lemonade or just sweetened. Am aiming to bottle it with about 4.5g sugar per bottle and perhaps 2 tabs sucralose. Or may mix with some lemonade at bottling as it's a bit too strong anyway.