Real Lemons Or Lemon Cordial For My Ginger Beer

[The Giant]

Howdy All

Doing up a batch of ginger beer and want to add a bit of lemon bite/refreshness to it.

It will be just a coopers standard GB kit, using kit yeast and prob 1.5kg of dextrose. I found my last batch to weak at around 2.5%.

My brother has successfully added a lemon tang to his by using lemon cordial in the bottle to prime and carb his GB at bottling time.

I would like to add it to the fermenter and be part of the fermentation process and then bottle as per normal.

The question is should I use real lemons or lemon cordial?

By using cordial it could act as a fermentable but will it give me the taste I desire? and if so how much? I believe the Coopers GB recipie is for 19l in total.

If I use real lemons i plan to juice them and use the zest and add this to the wurt. Again if I go this path, how many should I use? 3-4?

Thanks in advance!
Steve

 

[legham]

I would use real lemons but it is hard to tell how many. I would probably use 4 and make sure they are clean and sanitised.

 

[The Giant]

I actually think i might boil the juice and zest with say a litre of water and some of the dextrose. This way I'll kill anything nasty off

 

[legham]

When I have used fruit in the pased I usualy put it in about a week into the ferment. This is risky as the fermenting beer is very suseptible to infection but I have done it quite a few times like this and had no problems. I find that this way the vigous ferment dosen't scrub too much of the fresh fruit flavout away.

My 2 cents.

Good luck. Let us know hoe it goes.