Three days later and my mixture is still bubbling away.  Bubbles have slowed down a bit, but not too much.  Anyone else starting anything up?

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... and another update!  I noticed tonight that airlock activity had pretty much slowed to nothing, so I decided to pump it out of primary.  I'd usually go into a secondary fermenter at this point--and the liquid was still pretty turbid--but I felt like that was overkill for a one-gallon test batch, so I put it straight into a keg, where it's now sitting in the fridge. 

I also dropped a few ounces into a glass to taste, and I have to say I was shocked by the results!  Quite tasty, even warm and straight out of the fermenter, with just a bit of residual sweetness and more body than I'd expect from a brew made with only brown sugar (perhaps the molasses adds body?)  The acid balance is pretty good, but the ginger flavor could be a bit stronger.  It will be interesting to see if it intensifies or not during the next few days, as I allow all of the additional yeast to drop out of solution. 

Finally, since this forum is The Dregs, I have a photo for you... of the dregs!  Yum!

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This sounds promising. When we did it, fifty years ago, we used plenty of ginger. The more ginger and fizz it had the better. It could have been just that we'd brewed it ourselves without any adults knowing about it that made it seem so good, but when we sipped it, we couldn't imagine a nicer drink.

It's that moment you've all undoubtedly been waiting for.  No need any longer to stay up through the night, unable to sleep due to the pent-up excitement, frantically hitting the refresh button over and over, wondering when I'll unveil it... because here it is...

It's the final product of the Simple-Talk Ginger Beer Experiment #1.

The end result is a slightly-cloudy beverage, fairly light mouthfeel and quite bubbly (I'm dispensing it at ~15 PSI). It's on the dry side with just a shade of residual sweetness, and has enough ginger twang that you feel a bit of a tingle in the back of your throat upon first taking a sip.  The level of acidity is about perfect, offsetting the ginger and sweetness quite nicely.  Extremely tasty!

I'd call this a great success, and I will definitely make this again and again.  It is by far both the easiest recipe that I've done in years, and quite possibly the quickest beverage from carboy to drinking glass that I've ever made.  I'm very pleased with the results, and hope that some of you out there are cooking up a batch and will share your outcomes!

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Adam,

OK, you've inspired me to finally get started with a brew of my own. I've been recommended a place in cambridge that should be able to supply everything I need. However, I'd still appreciate a little more advice on ingredients and equiipment. My only experience so far with Home Brew has been:

Open the tin of gloopy brown malt mixture, pour into plastic barrel, add water, add yeast from packet, add hop powder from packet, stir, leave for a few weeks. I was pretty unimpressed with the results. It had a very yeasty aroma and the hop powder gave it quite a dull, very dry, aftertaste which was not at all like the fresh hoppy punch of my favored beers.

I'd like to use some decent quality malt, hops and yeast -- but I don't really know what that means in terms of the brewing process and equipment. All you mentioned previously, aside for the carbouy etc, was a "big kettle" -- do you have a photo?

If you could provide one of your reciepes -- preferably for a light, hoppy brew -- along with the forms in which you use the ingredients (pellet, powder, fresh..etc) then that would really help.

I'm definitely going to get started on this next weekend.

Cheers,

Tony.

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Tony Davis
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Tony,

For malt extract, I try to stick with powder.  It doesn't go bad if it stays sealed, unlike liquid extracts which can stale.  For hops, pellets or plugs are usually the easiest to work with... it really doesn't matter, IMO, although some people think the pellets retain less hop flavor.  For yeast, stick with something simple for your first brew.  See if the shop has packets of SafAle yeast, which is the best dry yeast you can get (at least, in the US -- I don't know what you can get in the UK). 

For the "big kettle", get yourself a stainless steel stock pot, 4+ gallons.  You should be able to find a cheap one to start with.  I think I got mine for around $20.  Better/more expensive kettles are better to use, but don't worry for now.

For an initial recipe, I think you should do something like:

1 lb crystal malt, crushed
0.5 lb biscuit malt, crushed
6 lb light dry malt extract
3 oz East Kent Golding hops
2 packets yeast
6 gallons of water (I like to use spring water, purchased in one-gallon bottles)
Optional: Irish moss or Irish moss extract ("whirlfloc" tablets)

Equipment: Kettle, 1 x 6.5 gallon carboy, 1 x 5 gallon carboy, 1 funnel with filter attachment (or mesh bag to fit in), carboy handles for both carboys, 1 siphon hose, 1 racking cane, 1 bottling cane, bottles, caps, capper, airlock with stopper

Simple technique:

1. The night before, stick two or three of your gallon jugs in the fridge (you'll see why later)
   
2. Also, buy a bunch of ice and have it on hand in the freezer (again, you'll see why in a bit)
   
3. Wake up early the day you're going to brew.  Have a cup of coffee.
   
4. Put the crushed malts in a fine mesh bag
   
5. Put 3 gallons of water in your kettle.  Put the kettle on the stove and start heating it.
6. Meanwhile, pop your malt bag into the kettle.  When the water starts to steam, kill the heat and let the malt steep for 20 minutes or so.
7. While you're waiting, start sanitizing your carboy, funnel, and anything else that will touch the wort post-boil
   
8. Remove the malt bag and fire up the heat again
9. When the water starts to boil, kill the heat and mix in the malt extract; get it THOROUGHLY mixed in (totally dissolved) in order to avoid burnt sugar at the bottom of your kettle
10. Fire up the heat again.
11. As soon as you reach a boil, dump in 1.5 oz of the hops and, if you're using it, the Irish moss
12. Warning: As soon as you dump in the hops, things may start foaming.  Keep a glass of cold water handy to cool the fires so you can avoid a boil-over.  Eventually, things will stabilize enough that you can turn your back.
13. Once that happens, have a beer.  Then, finish up any sanitizing duties.
14. 45 minutes later, drop in another ounce of hops.  Also, at this point, you should drop your yeast packets into some warm water, if the directions of the packets say to (not all yeast requires this)
15. 15 minutes later, drop in the final ounce of hops
16. Right after you do that, fill your sink with the ice from step 2, and put a bunch of water in with it to make a cold, icy bath
    
17. 5 minutes after step 15, kill the heat.  Put the lid on top of the pot, and place the pot in the bath of ice.  Agitate it to keep the convection going and speed the cooling process.  Your goal here is to get the wort as chilly as possible, as quickly as possible.  Keep agitating, etc, and keep the lid on.  When the pot is barely warm, or even better, somewhat cold to the touch, you can move on to the next step
18. Take 2 of the gallons of water that you put in the fridge, and put them in your 6.5 gallon carboy.
19. Fit a filter (or another fine mesh bag) into your funnel.  Carefully and slowly pour your wort through the filter and into the carboy -- where it will be cooled down even more by the water that was in the fridge, thereby guaranteeing that it won't be too hot for your yeast later.  The filter will remove the hops, and hopefully some of the "hot break" (protiens that form during the boil, that you don't want in your brew--but don't worry too much about it now, this is just your first one.)  Trust me on the "slowly" part here.  Too much speed will mean that you'll get the wonderful task of having to mop your entire kitchen floor, and maybe the walls too.
20. Top up the carboy with as much water as needed to get it to ~5.5 gallons
    
21. Put in the yeast.
22. Fit with an airlock.
23. Put the carboy in a dark place, preferably ~62-68 F
24. Check obsessively for the first 24 hours or so, until it starts bubbling away
25. When activity dies down to almost nothing (~7 days later), siphon the liquid off of the yeast and gunk into the 5-gallon carboy.  Fit that one with an airlock.  Siphon a bit into a glass, as well, so you can taste the progress :)
    
26. Let it sit another 7-10 days, during which a lot more yeast will drop out.
27. Mix 3/4 cups sugar with 1 1/2 cups of water, boil for five minutes on the stove, and force cool.  Put it into the 6.5-gallon carboy, then siphon the beer out of the 5-gallon carboy (off of all of the yeast that has collected at the bottom) and into the 6.5-gallon one.  The sugar will carbonate the beer in the bottles.
    
28. Sanitize your bottles.  Get your capper ready.
29. Siphon the beer (now mixed with the priming sugar solution) into the bottles.  Cap the bottles.
30. Store the bottles somewhere for two weeks or so.
31. Open.  Drink.  Repeat.  (note: when pouring, don't pour the last 1/4 ounce or so, as it will contain some yeast from the bottom of the bottle)
    
32. Let us know how it goes!

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Tony

I quite fancy a bit of home brew myself and Adam's instructions seem relatively straightforward, even for a novice like myself. Can you let me know where in Cambridge sells the kit? Maybe we can go together and get a discount on multiple purchases?

Nick

I think I forgot to stress one key point:

SANITIZE EVERYTHING that touches the beer post-boil.  Tubing, carboys, bottles, etc.  Anything that gets near the beer should have a quick dunk in some iodophor solution (or whatever sanitizer you can get there.)  Iodophor is the most popular one here; it's iodine-based and does not require a long contact time.  You mix up a solution, get everything wet for a minute or so, then let it air dry.  Simple and effective.  For carboys, I recommend leaving them rightside up and after 10 minutes or so inverting to pour off any of the liquid that will have invariably pooled at the bottom of the vessle.

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Adam,

Many thanks for the detailed instructions. Nick and I will head down to Cutlacks (http://www.cutlacks.co.uk) some time this week and get ourselves kitted out. We'll definitely let you know how it goes!

Cheers,
Tony.

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Tony Davis
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I want to stress yet another important point -- siphoning.

Siphon the beer from your fermenter quietly (preventing it from splashing around too much) into the bottling bucket. NEVER SUCK ON THE HOSE TO START A SIPHON!!! We recommend the “auto-siphon” as a useful addition to your brewing equipment. However, if you do not have one, simply fill the racking cane, tube with water holding the ends up in the air. Continue to hold the tube up high as you place the racking cane in the bucket, when you drop the tube into the bottling bucket the siphon should begin. When you are siphoning from the fermenter, don’t move the racking tube around too much, this will help keep out the trub (stuff at the bottom of the fermenter) from getting into the bottling bucket, thus making clearer beer! But if it does move around, don’t worry, it won’t hurt anything.

Ripped from this site that I just found when Googling for instructions on how to "siphon quietly".

I have never used an auto-siphon; I use the "fill the tube with water" trick every time.  I think that a bottling cane is absolutely necessary.  It's basically a tube with a little nub at the end that when not pushed on, blocks the flow of liquid.  When it is resting on something, however, it gets pushed up into the tube and the liquid can flow freely.  As soon as you lift it up, though, the flow stops.  It makes siphoning--especially into bottles, but also from fermenter to fermenter--a much easier and cleaner task (unless you like sticky floors).

The other important thing to note is that siphoning should be done so as to introduce a minimum amount of air/oxygen to the party.  The yeast eats a lot of the dissolved oxygen during the initial phases of fermentation, and the rest is expelled by all of the CO2 bubbling through the solution.  Re-introducing it later can cause off flavors... so don't ever pour the beer between containers, and be as careful as possible when siphoning.

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OK, ginger beer batch #2 is in the fermenter!  In the interest of reproducability, I actually measured things out this time:

2 1/3 cups lemon juice (juiced from 22 fairly small lemons)
45 heaping tablespoons of grated ginger (grated from 4 pounds of ginger)
6 lbs brown sugar (4 lbs dark, 2 lbs light)

Heated 1 1/2 gallons of water to boiling.  Added the sugar.  Let it boil for 8 minutes.  Then I added the juice and ginger, left it on the heat for two more minutes.  Then put a lid on it and forced it cool.  Added it to the fermenter along with enough water to get the total volume up to 5.5 gallons, and pitched 3 packets of Red Star Montrachet wine yeast.

I'm going to let this one rest in a secondary fermenter before it goes into the keg, so we'll see if that fixes the cloudiness I saw on the last batch... Will let you know when it's ready to go :)

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Back again with more ginger beer experiments!

The last batch, made in August of last year, turned out quite well, but I wanted to make the process easier.  Juicing those 22 lemons and peeling/grating that 4 lbs of ginger was a tremendous PITA!!  So I decided to try another tactic: No peeling of ginger, no juicing of lemons.  Let the food processor do the work.  The day I went to buy the lemons and ginger, the market was filled with fresh cherries, and inspiration hit.  Cherry ginger beer?  Why not?  Luckily, some sense kicked in when I imagined pitting several pounds of cherries, and after looking around for a while I discovered bottles of 100% cherry juice for sale.  My ingredients list for this batch:

20 lemons
4 lbs ginger
6 lbs "raw" sugar
1/2 gallon cherry juice
3 packets Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast

Using a knife, I cut the peels and pith off of all of the lemons, but did nothing else preparatory. I also washed the ginger.  Then I took all of the lemon meat and ginger and threw it into a food processor, where I blended it to a pulp.  This took about 15 minutes, including the time taken to cut the peels.  Much nicer than the four+ hours I spent juicing, peeling, and grating for the previous batch.

I combined the lemon/ginger mixture, the sugar, and around 2 gallons of filtered water in a stock pot and turned on the heat.  As soon as it hit a rolling boil I killed the heat, added the cherry juice, then covered the pot and submersed it in an ice bath until it came down to temp.  Added the mix--pulp and all--to a fermenter and topped up with filtered water to 5.5 gallons.  I pitched the 3 packets of yeast, and attached an airlock.

6 hours later and the yeast was living up to the description on the packets--fast (and hopefully clean) fermentation.  Three days and it was done.  I was left with around 4 gallons of very cloudy material sitting on top of 1.5 gallons of sediment.  All of that pulp had to go somewhere, it seems!  I racked off of the sediment into a secondary fermenter and let it sit for several days, but no additional clearing occurred.  After thinking long and hard about my fining options, I realized that boiling the lemons might have set the pectins and added some pectic enzyme to the carboy.  12 hours later and I had nearly crystal clear ginger beer sitting on yet another inch of sediment.

I racked the clear beer into a keg and force carbonated for two minutes at 45 PSI, put it in the fridge for a few days, and the following is the result:



The cherry juice gave a very nice color to the final result, and as you can see clarity is much improved compared to the previous photos I posted--pectic enzyme will be a component I always use in ginger beers from here on out.

Flavor-wise, I will admit that it needs some work.  Given the new method I used, 20 lemons produced far too tart an end result, and 4 lbs of ginger was also overkill.  The first sip of this brew is a shock to the system until the palate adapts.  Next time I will drop the number of lemons to maybe 12, and the ginger to 2.5 lbs.  I will also at least double, if not triple, the amount of cherry juice, in order to greatly increase the amount of cherry flavor.

All in all, not a bad batch!  By the way, the Cuvee yeast, which I'd never used before, was great--extremely clean ferment, and as I mentioned it was also very fast.  I'll definitely use it again.

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I too have been brewing for quite some time (about 8 years ago my wife gave me my first Mr. Beer kit for Christmas back then.)  I've since moved onto the carboys and pots and tubing that Adam referred to.  Since my wife and youngest son can not stand the smell of hops I tend to brew outside in the summer and in the garage in the winter months.  Though I've done full grain, it is so much easier to go with a partial mash (grain + extract).  The quality difference for the average home brewer is negligible.  The easist brew to start with for a first batch?  Well, an American Pale, Amber, or Brown would be quite easy.  By the wife, the wife came through again this year, got a keggerator system and that makes brewing SOOOOOOoooooo much easier.  I highly recommend ditching the bottles and switch to kegging from the get-go.

I'd love to do some lambic brewing, but fear of failure rules my thoughts on that.

 

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Timothy Ford