Malted Lemon And Cardamom Ginger Beer

[Fat Rocky]

Inspired by a good friends winter tea recipe I decided to try her concoction as a brew. I'm fairly new to brewing/mead making and I would love to hear your thoughts.

The recipe is as follows:

400ml of fresh lemon juice
200g of fresh cut and pealed ginger (pounded with a mortar and pestle)
3g of lightly dry roasted cardamon seeds (lightly crushed with mortar and pestle)
the zest of about 12 lemons (I was not paying attention how many at the time)
1 kg of Raw cane sugar
1kg Dextrose
1kg of Lite Dry Malt powder
5g of yeast nutrient
1 packet of Saflager s23 (11.5g)

I boiled the lemon, ginger, sugars and malt together with 12lt of water in my brew pot. After ten minutes of a light boil I removed from heat and placed the pot into a chill bath. After the wort/must (?) cooled I transferred to my primary fermentation vessel and added a balance of water to bring the total to 20lt. I chucked the cardamon seeds into the mix at some stage...

With 200ml of wort/must I re-hydrated my yeast with 5g of yeast nutrient and I am waiting for activity.

As of now I have not pitched the yeast but it seems to be making a nice froth in my 200ml of wort/must....

Hydrometer reading is 1.060 at 20C

When I rack the ginger beer into secondary I intend on adding 3 or 4 liters of sack mead for a strong honey taste and possibly additional sweetness. I would like the beverage to be lightly sparkling and I am not terribly convinced that adding the mead with help or hinder carbonation.

So yeah...what do you all think? As I've said, I'm fairly new to brewing/mead making and would love some feedback from any other similar concoctions.

Cheers

 

[vykuza]

Looks like an interesting take on it Rocks. Have you got a process in place to stop the fermentation to retain some sweetness? Adding the sack mead might just kick off the yeast again in your secondary.

 

[Fat Rocky]

Well I decided to give my little concoction a taste tonight and I was quite impressed. I have never made beer before and have never used malt, so when I decided to buy a 1kg pack it was little of a "what the hell" moment. I can say I think the addition it quite pleasing. I was expecting a much more pronounced lemon flavor but I think the combination of lemon and malt provided a good middle and equaled each other out a bit.

What surprised me the most is pronounced ginger flavour. I was thinking that with only 200g of ginger that it would be present but kinda in the background. Nope. It was very high and mighty and zinging quite strong. I could taste the cardamon very lightly but that is the way I wanted it.

The hydrometer read at 1.040 so I would guess its sitting around 3%.

Bottom line: it tastes bloody good now. I can't wait to give it a try next weekend.

Cheers

 

[bum]

Doing a quick bit on maths on my fingers...

Are you saying you bottled at 1040?

If so, you'd best be keeping the entire batch in the fridge and drinking it quick sticks.

 

[brettprevans]

What bum is saying is that you've bottles it with a heap of unfermented sugars thus a huge massive risk of bottle bombs or exploding bottles. Be very very careful.

Also there have been done posts about using malt in GB. From memory they haven't been favourable, so it's interesting to hear yours has cone out well.

 

[Fat Rocky]

I have not bottled the ginger beer yet, only taking a sample. I'm planning on giving it at least three weeks in the fermenter before I even think of bottling. I live in a very cold area, and my fermentation room is also my wine cellar. It sits at about 12-15 in winter. Perfect for beer brewing apparently? Anyway. My original plan was for this brew to be a malted "hard" lemonade. Then I started thinking about my friends winter tea drink. She mashes up heaps of ginger, lemon peel and cardamon seeds, and brings them to a boil. She then adds a little malt extract that you buy from the health food store, and honey. The whole thing is kinda "fly by the seat of my pants" at the moment. I've never used a beer yeast so when I got some krausan in my fermenter I kinda freaked at bit, but soon figured that it was all good.

Overall I think it should be a good drink. I'm going to take another sample next weekend and see how it tastes and get a hydrometer reading. I'll keep everyone posted on its progress.

Cheers

 

[bum]

Ah, good to hear. I jumped the gun on that one.

Most of my brews are a bit "fly by the seat of the pants"-specials (and there's usually a fair bit of "close enough is good enough" too).

Good luck with it.

 

[Fat Rocky]

I took a reading yesterday of my "ginger beer"....wow how time changes things. I think I mentioned that I kinda planed for the drink to be a hand lemonade. well the lemon flavour really came forward when I tasted it on Saturday. So I decided to chuck some frozen raspberries into the drink and rack into glass carboys. Should be interesting. I can still taste the ginger but hmm...it should be good.