This is our first soda-style brew! It's a hard and, hopefully, super-gingery ginger beer. I'm modifying (well, let's be honest: also specifying, since Buhner's recipes are not always sufficiently specific to allow a non-interpretive brewing) a recipe here from Stephen Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers (partly in the hope of testing some of his theories—see his heretical rules and heresies on pp. 430–32). That recipe, from p. 288 of the book, is simply called Ginger Beer—1819. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out. We're calling this Rhyming Slang after what is probably the only mention of ginger beer in Monty Python.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 1 lb. dark brown sugar.
  • 2 lb. white sugar.
  • 2 gal. distilled water.
  • ¼ cup lemon juice.
  • 4.8 oz. peeled and sliced ginger root.
  • 4 oz. fine-sliced, unpeeled ginger root, added to the brew on 4 March 2017.
  • 1 packet Lalvin K1V-1116 wine yeast, pitched in on 4 March 2017 after being rehydrated in ¼ c. distilled water at 104℉.
  • added on 7 March 2017:
    • 1 c. Kirkland grade A maple syrup
    • 1 tsp. Fermax yeast nutrient
    • ½ tsp. Fermaid K
    • distilled water to 2 c.; heated

Brew date: 8 February 2017.
Original gravity: 1.092 (but we're calculating it as if the ABV were 1.104).
Bottling day: 26 March 2017
Final gravity: 0.997
Estimated ABV: 14.5%

Yield:

  • 9 x 12 oz. beer bottles
  • 1 x 750 mL swing-top beer bottle
  • 3 x 22 oz. beer bottle
  • hydrometer tube

Total: Approx. 205 fl. oz., or about 1.6 gallons..

Sanitized everything. Heated the water in the five-gallon brew pot, then stirred in the sugars after the water hit 150℉. Poured in the lemon juice and the ginger, which Xenia was kind enough to slice and peel. Boiled for 51 minutes, then killed the flame and covered it. Decided not to cool with the immersion chiller because the 1819 recipe doesn't, and this affects the steeping time of the ginger, which I wanted to keep the same. Let the pot cool, covered, on the stove to promote airflow, for about five hours.

In the meantime, collected the leftover yeast slurry (WLP500) from batches 036 and 037, which I bottled in the interim. The total volume of the remaining yeast slurry was approx. 2 cups and included remaining cider/mead to some extent. When the temperature of the wort reached 78℉, I poured it into the three-gallon carboy through a funnel. (It looks like almost half a gallon of water evaporated during the boil— the carboy really is just about half full.) Stirred vigorously for several minutes through the carboy neck, then popped in an airlock and filled it and labeled the carboy.

On 4 March, added another 4 oz. sliced ginger root, then rehydrated a packet of Lalvin K1V-1116 and pitched it in.

On 7 March, added a cup of maple syrup, nutrients, and about a cup of water.

Observations

  • 2017-02-09T11:02: No evidence of bubbling in the airlock.
  • 2017-02-10T12:07: No evidence of bubbling in the airlock. Yeast has settled to the bottom of the carboy.
  • 2017-02-11T14:31: There's carbon dioxide discharge through the airlock! The yeast has spread through the wort in a cloud, and I'm starting to wonder whether re-using this particular yeast was the right choice.
  • 2017-03-04T18:00: Tasted: it's still too sweet, and though it's pretty gingery, it's not gingery enough for me. Added more sliced ginger root, pitched in a wine yeast.
  • 2017-03-04T21:00: There's sluggish bubbling in the airlock.
  • 2017-03-07T00:22: Added some maple syrup, water, and nutrients.
  • 2017-03-07T15:48: Bubbles are coming through the airlock at a rate of about 5/min. Several slices of ginger have stopped floating and dropped to the bottom. (Though it's impossible to say how many, because the liquid is not transparent.)
  • 2017-03-26: Bottled, yielding about 1.6 gallons at about 14.5% ABV.

Lessons learned

  • WLP500 apparently generates a permanent haze that cannot be removed with cold-crashing.