Ginger Beer Query

[albrews]

hi everyone,

I am new to this and have had a ball looking through this site. It's been great.

I have just started brewing, and decided to give it ginger beer a go from scratch - mostly because I was broke, and was just using stuff we had in the house.

I think I was trying to be a bit creative and may have stuffed up in the process and am looking for advice if anyone can offer it.

This is how I prepared it:

1st step - ginger beer plant (1 teaspoon of sugar, ginger, bakers yeast - every day over a week I fed it with suguar, sporadically adding a little lemon here, cayene pepper there, dry ginger, etc (three weeks later it is going great guns)

After a week of feeding the plant, I mixed in:

4l water
1 kilo brown sugar
1k white sugar
handful of ginger sliced thinly
4 lemons quartered
2 dried apricots
2 table spoons maple syrup

I boiled all this until sugar was dissolved and the lemon and ginger was soft and poured it into the fermenter.

I then put cold water in the fermenter and juggled the temp until it was right.

I poured in the ginger beer plant, sealed it up, and 12 hours later it was bubbling away.

I left it like this for about 12 days.

When I bottled it it smelt a little bit too lemony, but none the less, I kinda expected it. About another 8-12 hours later, I tested the PET bottles and they were feeling tight, in the next day or so I one of the was feeling very tight so I released a little air and it fizzed.

I have left the bottles like this for 5 days now sitting.


My main concern it that I did not put a primer in the bottles (will this cause it not to be carbonated?). But I would also be interested in any feedback others might have on what I have done.

let you know in a couple of days how I go.

cheers
[/quote

hi , it can be treated like beer brewing in that let it ferment to the normal low gravity(use hydrometer) and then prime the bottles as usual or gas a keg of the brew using co2 gas.

it sounds like that you bottled before complete fermentation, so it should be fizzy, but will your bottles break?.

cheers
alan

 

[billwill]

cheers tropical brews for the advice. My ginger beer is a kid free zone and am hoping for it to stay that way

cheers

 

[flattop]

Billwill i agree, 2kilo's fermentables 5l water it's gonna be falling over juice.
Like the extra additives though.
Don't suppose you took the SG at the start or the end?
Looks like the yeast is still working in the bottles.....

Just put my coopers kit on this evening
! can Coopers Ginger beer
200g DME
400g Dextrose
1 cinnamon stick broken up

Aiming for a low alcohol version. approx 3% would be fine SG= 1012 after pitching.

 

[tdack]

The young fella here has recently finished a week of feeding his ginger beer plant, then making the sugar syrup and bottling.

Plant was about 100gms of DME and 4 good teaspoons of powerdered ginger into a litre of boiled, cooled water. Pitched a Coopers kit yeast into it and then fed it a teaspoon of DME and a teaspoon of ginger every day for about 8 days.

At the end of that time the contents of the plant jar was given a good shake and strained through a double layer of muslin.

Boiled up 3.5 litres of water and added 1kg of table sugar to it. The syrup was then mixed with the strained liquid and topped up to 7 litres total.

Bottled it and have had it sitting for the last week. All the bottles have carbed up well, tasting will be on the weekend.