Ingredients
3 large pieces of ginger (about a kilo)
1 cinnamon stick
10 cloves
500g light crystal malt
1kg dextrose
Rehydrated wine yeast
Method
Run the ginger through a food processor then put every thing in a pot with five litres of water and boil with the lid on for an hour. After the boil, add 10 litres of cool boiled water and pitch yeast when it is at the right temp. I left all the ingredients in the fermenter until I racked it into the second one (probably 3 days). I primed the whole thing for bottling by racking a second time and adding the correct amount of dextrose.
I ended up with nineteen bottles of excellent ginger wine / beer. I don’t know what the alcohol content was but it kicked arse! The cloves probably had something to do with that. I used cloves in a stout for the first time about four years ago and I overdid it. Two bottles and I didn’t want to get off my chair. For hours. Cloves are a natural local anaesthetic, you can use it for tooth ache and stuff like that apparently. Well, it has more of a “general” effect when taken internally, in conjunction with alcohol at least.
Cheers,
Oliver
How much sugar do you add to prime before bottling? Thanks
G’day Jason.
I’ve not done this recipe myself, seeing as it’s signed by Oliver, it’d be from http://www.homebrewandbeer.com/forum. But generally speaking the correct range (in dextrose) is 0-8g per litre. 0 is obviously no carbonation, 8 is high carbonation. I generally prime my beers around the 6g/L mark. If using sucrose, note that it’s 10% more potent per gram (because dextrose has water molecules trapped in the crystal matrix). Note also that this is the range for bottling. Priming kegs requires less sugar.
Cheers,
Rob