Hey guys. We are looking for some feedback on this new ginger beer recipe:
https://kegland.com.au/products/hard-blunderburg-ginger-beer-kit
As you can see this is a "no ferment" product. The alcohol comes from a new neutral alcohol base that we are also selling on the website called "
VINKA". The word VINKA (VIN-KA) has been chosen as this is basically like wine (VIN) vodka (KA). As this is technically wine it comes under the WET tax so it's exceptionally good value and therefor it's an economical way to make ginger beer without the need for any fermentation at all. Literally you pour into the keg and carbonate and you can pretty much be drinking instantly.
This will come into a new range under our "Ready to Keg" recipes. For this ginger beer it includes three main ingredients:
1. The VINKA Base
- You can think of this as a vodka but with a slightly fruity taste which is similar to the type of fruity esters that you might get from Rum or Pisco but not as bold. We do pass this product through our proprietary filtration process. We also have several different sweetness levels depending on what you want to use the product for. If however you did not want this alcoholic base you can ferment your own sugar wash to make the alcohol if you prefer.
2. The Ginger Impressence Flavour
- All the Ginger in this is derived from real ginger so there is nothing artificial about the ginger but what we have done is very efficiently extracted the Ginger Oleoresins, Gingerine, Ginger Aromatics and Terpenes from ginger root. This product is then stabilized, solubilized and homogenized so that the oils are properly suspended in solution. This process is important as it will result in a stable ginger beer at the end whereby you don't get the tasty ginger oils separate from the liquid. It also ensures that the product has the correctly level of cloudiness. The suspension of these ginger oils and gingerine is important as when you drink the ginger beer these are emulsified components need to hit your tongue to deliver that "burn" which give you that "spicy" ginger taste. This is also how commercial ginger beer is produced.
3. Sweetener
In most instances we recommend sugar as the sweetness from the "VINKA Medium Base" is not sweet enough on it's own. You can experiment this and add more/less of the sugar products if you like. We are also going to start to pack down artificial sweeter that you can purchase separately but to be honest this is a controversial subject. Some customers like the artificial sweeteners or are watching their weight and other customers (like myself) can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners in ginger beer. As a result we have left this out of the kit and you can either buy your own sugar from the supermarket or purchase artificial sweetener separately.
4. Fermentation Stopper
As you would be aware any product that contains sugar really needs some way to prevent it from continuing to ferment. We sell a small sachet that you chuck in at the end. If you are going to finish the whole keg in a few days and keep the product refrigerated then perhaps you can leave this preservative out. With that said we highly recommend it as it has no flavor impact and will prevent yeast growing when you don't want it to.
I personally have tried using real ginger many times and achieving the same result is extremely difficult to be honest. You can certainly end up with a good product sometimes but real ginger root produces components that separate from the substrate solution too easily. As a result you can end up with some of the principle parts of the ginger separating, dropping out of solution with the yeast or alternatively not efficiently extracting it from the ginger in the first place. In some instances I have added several kg of ginger to the fermenter only to be disappointed that I did not extract enough strong ginger intensity and then had huge fermenter losses as I had a fermenter that was 1/4 full of chopped up ginger. Even if you purchase the ginger really cheap you may find the the losses and cost still to be higher than our Ginger Impressence Flavour. When we make the Ginger Impressence Flavour shot we use Steam Extraction, Solvent Extraction and also a centrifuge so we get almost 100% extraction of the flavour out of the root so even though you are paying for us to do this for you it's probably still cheaper due to the extraction efficiencies we have.
At the end of the day this is a very new product and we are not sure if we are onto a winner or not. If you like the enjoyment of making a product from scratch from raw ingredients this product is certainly not for you at all as it's literally pour into the keg and you are done.
With this kit but we have spent quite a lot of money and time researching this particular topic. We are really keen to get your feedback on this kit in particular. Do any of you guys want to try this out and report back to the forum? A comparison between this kit and the other kits you have tried would really be great and helpful for other forum members.
