Homebrewing Ginger Beer

We like rhyming. And, since it's always fun trying to brew something new, we decided to come up with a ginger homebrew recipe.

Our goals were to get something with that ginger “zing” that has a little alcohol in it and also to see if we could get close to any of the examples sold in stores (We're big fans of Red Stripe Light Ginger). Basically, we wanted to make a ginger ale without making “ginger ale”. This was also a budget batch and we only wanted to spend about thirty bucks.

With our little homebrew setup we decided to make a 6 gallon (22.7 litre) batch. Our single-infusion mash efficiency, with batch sparging, is a casual 70%. And if you don't know what any of those terms mean, it's okay. So, at the homebrew store we picked up the following ingredients:

5.50 lbs (2.5 kg) 2-row Pale
5.50 lbs (2.5 kg) White Wheat Malt
0.33 lbs (150 g) Crystal 10
0.50 lbs (227 g) Rice hulls
0.50 lbs (227 g) Fresh ginger, actually picked up at the grocery store
20.0 ibu (Tinseth formula) Magnum hops (just about any hop will do)

All of our grains were American-variety. For the yeast, we didn’t want anything to compete with ginger so we picked the non-confrontational Nottingham dry ale yeast.

Time to fire up the burner!

We got 4.9 gallons (18.55 litres) of water up to 175F (79.4C) and threw-in all of the 2-row, wheat & rice hulls, letting them soak for 60 minutes (if you're unfamiliar, that part is called “mashing”, for some reason). Our mash had started at an intentionally-warm 160.5F (71.4C), but cooled to 155.5F (68.6C) over the hour, just as we had expected. At the first runoff we had about 1.067 on the hydrometer.

For the batch sparge (sparging means “rinsing the grain with water”) we added 3.5 gallons (13.25 litres) of water that had been heated-up to 170F (76.7C). We were expecting the second runoff to be around 1.020 but it ended up a little closer to 1.026. But that's probably within the margin of error for using a 2-quart pitcher to measure 3.5 gallons of water with one hand, while simultaneously consuming alcohol with the other hand.

So, we then had 7.0 gallons (26.5 litres) ready to boil (if you have any homebrew questions, by the way, feel free to ask them). Total boil time planned was six-zero minutes. We threw the hops in as soon as we had a boil. With 10 minutes remaining we threw half of the ginger in.

Do ve grate or do ve chop ze ginger?

We weren’t sure if we should grate or chop the ginger. Or if it should be skinned...aliive. A few minutes of internet research reminded us that 80% of internet results for homebrew are crap, so we opted to leave the skin and chop it into pieces about the size of your pinky nail. Seemed to work completely fine for us.

There’s the wind up and the Pitch...

At the end of the boil, we had just over 6 gallons (22.7 litres) of wort. We cooled everything down with our “we made it with Home Depot parts” immersion chiller and pitched the yeast a little cold at 66F (18.9C). For the next 5 days we kept the beer at around 70F (21.1C), and then on day 5 we racked to another carboy and added the rest of the chopped ginger. For this addition, we boiled the ginger in a very small amount of water, for 1 minute, adding both the ginger and the water.

Fifteen days later we have a pretty darn good Ginger Beer. We banished ours to a dark, corny keg dungeon and drank it immediately. There were no survivors. But it would also be appropriate to bottle-condition humanely at this point. Just make sure to carbonate a little on the high side--- The added bitterness balances the sweetness of the ginger.

The Sensory Analysis

If you brew it to our specs, this beer should finish crystal clear. The color is similar to a Blonde Ale and you really get the ginger aroma right off the bat. The initial taste is very clean and crisp, finishing with a big ginger aftertaste. From a starting gravity of 1.050, our ending ABV was ~4.8%. We went out and picked up some Red Stripe Light Ginger and ours was very flavor-comparable (Hey, who’s going to write a blog post about their homebrew when it sucks?), with Red Stripe feeling a little weaker. We aren't going to say that we used too much ginger; however, we might put in a little more ginger during the boil and a little less in the secondary, next brewday.

Overall, we were very pleased with how this recipe turned out and we’ll do it again this summer. It was also one of the more affordable batches we've ever done, costing just under $30 for 6 gallons of beer.

And we definitely answered the question, “Do you leave the skin on when you homebrew with ginger?”: Leaving the skin on is completely legit.

Red Stripe Light Ginger is brewed by Desnoes & Geddes, Ltd.
www.redstripebeer.com