01/01/2011 Home Brewed Ginger Beer

Here I was going to write a post about my second attempt at Home Brewed Ginger Beer started in January and it seems I didn't keep any notes! Let this be a lesson to any one who reads, always always always write down everything you do. That way if you make something really good you can go back and do it again. Or, in the event of errors (which is what happened with this batch), look at what went wrong and remember it for next time. Also, take pictures of everything! I keep forgetting that I have a digital camera now and end up making something to only remember after the fact (hence the last of photos in today's post).

Here is the post from the first attempt, it has the recipe and process that I used.
07/18/10 Ginger Beer Plant (bottled 07/25/10)

From what I remember I only did two things differently. I juiced four lemons and used that instead of the 120ml. The 120ml was just what I had on hand and this time I remembered to pick up the lemons. I believe that four lemons yielded around 300ml of juice or so, but I'm not entirely sure. I also used a different yeast, Nottingham ale yeast instead of the Muntons Premium Gold. As far as I can tell from the little that I drank it didn't really make much of a difference.

There are also a few observations that I made while researching other similar recipes. This isn't really an alcoholic Ginger Beer. The yeast only have a small amount of fermentables to work with, 28tsp of sugar, before being diluted with 6.5 liters of water. It seems that the yeasts only job is carbing the bottles and perhaps some other mysterious function that will boggle mankind for eons.

The second observation is that yeast are hungry little critters, and it's a good idea to try and keep as much as possible out of the liquid you take from the jar. The cheese cloth slipped a little when I was filtering and I didn't think anything of it at the time and mixed it in with the water and bottled away (really, I was just lazy. shhh). This ended up with the making the bottles carb really, really fast, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing... But they geysered all over the place when opened, disturbing the yeast that settled in the bottom and making for a cloudy, yeasty beverage that wasn't really that appealing.

And the last observation is that a sanitizing agent, say Potassium Metabisulphite, is not a good thing to leave a stirring implement in, say a spoon. It will tarnish, eat through, and ruin the spoon and if you don't notice right away could be used to stir whatever if it you are working on. Which then could potentially cause off tastes or harmful effects. At the very least the tainted concoction shouldn't be trusted. It was a combination of this and the geysers that caused me to end up pitching this batch out :( Better to be safe then needing new kidneys or something.