Ginger Beer recipes: What's your secret?

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

[dannat (Daniel)]

Yeah - go to a home brewery shop & pick up their yeast - sometimes the supermarket stuff is old & tired(a bit like some astronomers I imagine)
I a not sure about the alcohol - I have made it at school(s) & so we err rather don't mention it may/may not have alcohol in it It quietens the kids in the arvo anyway

The kids rather like the idea of it , Maybe I should test it??

the sugar affects the alcohol content also

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Mmmm.. ginger beer.....

My old grannies recipe called for 5 (don't know why 5) sultanas popped into each bottle before capping. They gather bubbles and float up and down all day. When the sultanas stopped moving it was ready. They also add a taste of their own.

Ginger beer - the best drink in the world

[MrB (Simon)]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

....
Guess I'll just have to drink some of that horrible stuff they call "soft" drink. Yuck!
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Originally Posted by [1ponders]

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Now to search out a supply of plastic bottles.
....

Coopers(and a couple of others, like BrewCraft) make a brown 740ml PET bottle for homebrewers, check your local supermarket (Woolies/Coles/KMart etc)
The colour is important with beer because it avoids 'light-strike' but with GB it shouldn't matter as there's no humulones (the bitterness from hops).
About $12 for 15 of them in a box.
PET bottles can still go kabloomey, but not nearly as dangerous as flying glass...
They use the standard screw cap, so if you squeeze you're bottles and they feel like rocks, just give 'em a slight twist and let a little gas out to lower the pressure.
No more bottle bombs.

Oh, and a plug for my other timewaster: www.AussieHomeBrewer.com
Mostly beer stuff there, but with over 6000 members, GB has and does crop-up now and then, use the search function for the archives.

Oh, a tip for the PET bottles if you decide to use them.... tear-off the annoying security thing(the bit that gets left on the bottle-neck) from the caps before you put them on the bottles, makes the bottles easier to re-use later. Otherwise you have to use side cutters to get them off the bottles.
Replacement caps are cheap and can be bought in bags of 100.
Also, brews slowly oxidise in PET bottles, current rule-of-thumb is to not leave a brew for more than 6 months in PET bottles. I think this is a humulone thing too, so might not affect GB.

[RB (Andrew)]

It's been a while since I last made a brew of GB.
We all love it, it's the best refreshing drink IMHO.
I'll see if I can dig up a GB recipe.

Had a local brew supplier here who had lots of great advice.
Also made alc.apple cyder and of course beer, including Stout.....mmmmmm!

We've even made our own wines over the years.
Around this time of year we'd head off to the markets and source a special selection of wine grapes.
We then crush, press and barrel the juice and finally bottle it.

Originally Posted by Omaroo

My old grannies recipe called for 5 (don't know why 5) sultanas popped into each bottle before capping. They gather bubbles and float up and down all day. When the sultanas stopped moving it was ready. They also add a taste of their own.

I've done this too and it works well.

[Outbackmanyep]

My ginger beer recipe!

Rule # 1 - Forget the ginger.....
Rule # 2 - refer to rule 1

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Thanks folks there are some great ideas here.

Originally Posted by dannat

Yeah - go to a home brewery shop & pick up their yeast

Thanks Daniel I will.

Originally Posted by Omaroo

My old grannies recipe called for 5 (don't know why 5) sultanas popped into each bottle before capping. They gather bubbles and float up and down all day. When the sultanas stopped moving it was ready. They also add a taste of their own.

I'll definately try this...mmmm...GB soaked grapes

Originally Posted by MrB

Coopers(and a couple of others, like BrewCraft) make a brown 740ml PET bottle for homebrewers, check your local supermarket (Woolies/Coles/KMart etc)
The colour is important with beer because it avoids 'light-strike' but with GB it shouldn't matter as there's no humulones (the bitterness from hops).
About $12 for 15 of them in a box.
PET bottles can still go kabloomey, but not nearly as dangerous as flying glass...
They use the standard screw cap, so if you squeeze you're bottles and they feel like rocks, just give 'em a slight twist and let a little gas out to lower the pressure.
No more bottle bombs.

Oh, and a plug for my other timewaster: www.AussieHomeBrewer.com
Mostly beer stuff there, but with over 6000 members, GB has and does crop-up now and then, use the search function for the archives.

Oh, a tip for the PET bottles if you decide to use them.... tear-off the annoying security thing(the bit that gets left on the bottle-neck) from the caps before you put them on the bottles, makes the bottles easier to re-use later. Otherwise you have to use side cutters to get them off the bottles.
Replacement caps are cheap and can be bought in bags of 100.
Also, brews slowly oxidise in PET bottles, current rule-of-thumb is to not leave a brew for more than 6 months in PET bottles. I think this is a humulone thing too, so might not affect GB

Thank goodness I don't have to drink all that Choke. I don't think I could do it without rum in it. 6 Months, who lets home brew last for 6 months

[vash (Ashley)]

Looks like I'm not the only ginger beer aficionado here then. It's the only beer I can drink now, 2 years ago I got very sick and had a liver infection, now anytime I drink alcohol I get a bit of an uneasy feeling (not due to the amount I might add).

The Last road trip we went on I found my esky wedge nicely in between the front seats of my car, had it full of BB ginger beer a few sarsaparilla's and some cascade ginger beer to mix it up a little, was good fun.

I remember back in high school we made ginger beer as part of science, when we tested it we found it to be a little over 5%, and consequently got tipped down the drain as you can't supply alcohol to minors. I think I remember you can add cream of tartar which I believe makes the PH level a bit lower, just to save your tonsils a little.
also found these http://www.homemade-dessert-recipes....r-recipes.html

[MrB (Simon)]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

.....6 Months, who lets home brew last for 6 months

Haha, good question.
Some people brew heaps, some people(like me) love different beer styles but don't drink much.
Some beers, particularly the heavier ones, are much better after aging, like stouts, barleywines etc.
Lagers need.. well... lagering(cold storage) the longer the better - within reason. The famous Oktoberfest/Märzen is brewed in March(Märzen), stored for 6 months before serving in September.

At a club meeting(West Coast Brewers) we had a blind tasting of two Chimay Grand Reserves, one a 2006 vintage, the other a 2001.
Everyone picked the 2001 and described it as plums/raisens(sp?) and being much fuller in flavour, kinda like a port.

Maybe store 2 or 3 glass bottles of each batch of your GB to try in years to come, you might be surprised

[Kokatha man]

Mr B beat me to the "punch" - PET's feel very "hard" at the neck when the pressure is right up, and a slight unscrewing relieves excess pressure. I wouldn't go back to glass now, despite a sentimental attraction - just too many exploding bottles and mess!

Speaking of explosions, obviously all you folks that use recipes that add yeast (of whatever variety) are cupboard alkies: spinning that yarn about "just having a home made ginger beer!"

Either that or my brew with added yeast went off the rails somehow (ref "Mrs Beeton's Cookbook": you know, the one that recommended boiling up a couple of pounds of flowering hemp heads in water for some minor ailment or another, or oriental poppy head syrup recipes.....)

Anyway, it was real "rocket fuel" - half a vegemite glass and you were off on an interplanetary tour: you know, before you realize it, Mars and Jupiter zap past; the next thing - Saturn Uranus!

But here's the home-made lemonade (no/low alcohol I presume) recipe - it does require a starter sample, which was supplied to me by the person who gave me the recipe. It may not even be necessary - I think it's activated by wild yeast in the air - but the drink is a real lemony, dry and delicious/refreshing brew: in fact it's the aforesaid flavour drink but also a ginger beer without the ginger flavour/taste.

3 cups of sugar, juice of 6 lemons, 24 cups water combined: leave 3 lemon halves floating in the bucket/container of this mix overnight (24 hours) with half a bottle of starter brew - all covered with a gauze/muslin cloth. Bottle after 24 hours and wait 5 days to drink - squeezing PET bottle necks to ascertain gas build-up.

I reckon you don't need the half bottle of starter from a previous brew if you leave the mix under the cloth in the bucket for an extra day or two before bottling - I'll try this out to find out. A delicious drink young or aged!

Cheers, Darryl.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Sounds like a very interesting brew Darryl. Do you think you could find out the concoction of the starter brew? I'd like to give it a go.

[Suzy_A]

For PET bottles - collect empty coke, lemonade etc from friends. Just make sure they haven't been keeping weed-killer in them... Wash them out with sodium metabisulphate or use a UV-A source (germicidal lamp) to sterilise them.

Or you can buy the bottles from a bottle wholesaler for about 20 c each.

As for them still going bang - yes, they can. But being hit by bits of plastic is no where as bad as glass. A month or so ago, I overpressurised a 1.25 L PET bottle with CO2 from a cylinder. PET bottles go bang at about 200 psi, compared to glass soft-drink or beer bottles at about 100 psi. Champers will take about 200 psi as well, but as the glass is thicker than normal bottles and travel faster due to the higher pressure, they cut deeper...

I was standing about 0.5 m from the PET bottle when it went off and it took me about 20 minutes to find (the remains of) it, and the kitchen isn't that big...

I found the trick to gassing GB (or anything else) in a PET bottle when using bottled CO2 is to chill it to just above freezing, then gas it until the bottle feels hard, let it sit a minute and then SHAKE IT! And then do this a few times.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Why are you gassing your GB Suzy? I thought the yeast was supposed to do that. And how do you gas it? Do you have a special adapter to connect the gas bottle and the GB bottle?

[Kokatha man]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Why are you gassing your GB Suzy? I thought the yeast was supposed to do that. And how do you gas it? Do you have a special adapter to connect the gas bottle and the GB bottle?

Gassing :sc ared::scare d:home made ginger beer or lemonade or any of these types of brews!!! That is so ***** heretical that the perpetrator ought to be made to convert to some faith or another, even if they're an atheist, just so they can be banished/excommunicated, or whatever!!!

Please!!! We've acquiesced with PET's and screw tops etc, isn't there a scrap of a vestige of decency left in this plastic, artificial, simulated existence to leave the sacredness of naturally carbonated brews alone?

I suppose you use water bought from the supermarket, with dextrose or whatever and artificial ginger concentrate from a chemical supply mob?!?

Wash your mouth out with a double concentration of sodium metabisulphite!!!

ps - I'll trial a lemonade brew that doesn't use a "starter" shot from the last batch to see if it will self-generate the brewing process, cheers, Darryl.

[Suzy_A]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Why are you gassing your GB Suzy? I thought the yeast was supposed to do that. And how do you gas it? Do you have a special adapter to connect the gas bottle and the GB bottle?

I got some high pressure hose (with a bore of about ... 1 mm?? and some brass fittings. One end goes to a small CO2 bottle and valve, the other end and about 200 mm of hose goes through a standard PET soft-drink bottle plastic screw-on lid. I used some industrial epoxy glue to seal around the hose where it goes through the lid.

I fill a PET bottle with whatever, then chill it and then put the hose and lid on and then gas it up.

I use it to make soda water and to gas up my home made GB, apple cider, sparking apple or froot joose etc.

Apple cider - and most other fermented beverages - taste better, at least in my opinion, if they are fermented and then the yeast and 'lees' are left to settle and the clear drink is then decanted off and left to mature for a few months. This usually causes most of the yeast produced CO2 to be lost. It also gets rid of the 'yeasty' taste, which I usually don't like.



This maturing is particularly important with apple cider as there is actually a secondary bacterial malic acid fermentation and this typically takes a month or two as it is very slow. The apples' very sour malic acid is converted into less sour citric acid. This isn't that important if you're making a sweet cider, but for dry cider, without the malic acid fermentation, the cider is too sour.

Doing it this way also allows the brew to be kept for much longer without it being tainted by dead yeast which gives it a vegemite flavour. Also if the drink is then yeast-free, it allows the adjustment of sweetness by adding extra sugar without any more fermentation taking place.

I usually make up the cider and GB in winter so that it's ready for summer.

As for the yeast that settles out, I have been thinking about trying to make vegemite, except I need a large centrifuge for that - the making of vege/mar/pro-mite is actually very technical.

Just another note on gassing, the other way is to add a few grams of dry-ice to the bottle and stick the lid on quick. This is by far the cheapest way to do it (DI is about $10 a kilo and will do about 200 L) but you need a lot of clean, dry and sterile bottles so you can do them all one after the other.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Dry Ice. Now I have heard it all.

When I picked up some brewers yeast yesterday the shop was advertising some sort of "drop" (like a lollie apparently) that you can drop into the bottle to give it some fizz. Might look into that. Sound safer than mucking around with compressed CO2 or dry ice.

Thanks for the idea of decanting the clear off. I'll make sure I leave a few bottles from each batch and try that.

I'm trying a bit of an experiment atm. Yesterday I split my developing bug into two. To one half I added a small satchel of Brewers yeast and the other I left alone. Of course the BY one started to bubble away fairly quickly, but then it died off (it's picked up now because of the warmth of the day I think). But the other one started out slowly but is now like a very slow simmer and the fluid has gone slightly treaclish in consistency, much thicker than the BY one. Is the fluid meant to go thickish like this? Neither is "frothing" yet though

[Suzy_A]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Dry Ice. Now I have heard it all.

...some sort of "drop" (like a lollie apparently) that you can drop into the bottle to give it some fizz. Might look into that. Sound safer than mucking around with compressed CO2 or dry ice.

Yesterday I split my developing bug into two. ... Is the fluid meant to go thickish like this? Neither is "frothing" yet though

Nothing wrong with dry ice - works well.

The drop is just a lollie - a measured amount of sugar. After the main fermentation, you stick the brew in a bottle and then the drop in and you get a second fermentation with the right amount of gas to gas it up. Much cheaper to just make your own - dissolve some sugar in water and measure out the right number of ml.

Don't know about the split lot. The froth is just the bubbles collecting on top and usually takes a while.

[Kokatha man]

I've made my views known on home brews and carbonation, but "each to their own" as my dear old mum was wont to say.

I'm more interested in Suzy_A's telescope - where did you get that 10" f4 Neut on Vixen SXW mount: who did that to it , and was there any pain involved?

Not sure whether old Isaac would've approved of the procedure willingly!

Regards, Darryl.

[C.A.L.]

At the SPSP last weekend I was drinking some ginger beer that a friend of mine makes and bottles at 'The Beer Factory' in Sydney: http://www.thebeerfactory.com.au/

It's 5.9% alcohol - and not bad - you really can't tell it from ordinary ginger beer until the second bottle. Not quite as sweet as lolly water, but just as easy to drink. Mixes quite nicely with astronomy - though I admit a nice cup of hot chocolate with a drop of brandy goes down well too.

Cheers,
Cathi

[Kokatha man]

Originally Posted by Kokatha man

I've made my views known on home brews and carbonation, but "each to their own" as my dear old mum was wont to say.

I'm more interested in Suzy_A's telescope - where did you get that 10" f4 Neut on Vixen SXW mount: who did that to it , and was there any pain involved?

Not sure whether old Isaac would've approved of the procedure willingly!

Regards, Darryl.

On further reflection, was that how the old "ball and claw" type mounts evolved into just a simple claw, that later became the basic alta/zimuth....?!?