Recently, my girlfriend and I discovered hard ginger beer and decided it was delicious. There a couple versions for sale at Bin Inn, but it’s pretty expensive stuff. I do a lot of homebrewing, but mainly just brew beer. I thought this would be a great opportunity to branch out.
If you have never brewed before, don’t worry! The yeast do most of the work. This ginger beer recipe is super simple and takes much less effort than all-grain beer brewing. There is no “right” way to brew. I’ll be presenting one way to do it, the way I did it. Where appropriate, I’ll also give different options that you can use depending on what gear you have access to.
Like many hobbies, it can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. There are a million gadgets you can buy, but in the end, you are just putting yeast in with a sugar, from which they make alcohol. People have been doing this for thousands of years, so don’t overthink it.
Step 1: Ingredients:
For this recipe I used the following:
3.5 pounds of fresh ginger
6 pounds of turbinado sugar
6 lemons
6 limes
Red star champagne yeast
(totally optional):
Yeast nutrients
Campden tablets to stop fermentation
Whirl floc tablets to help with clarity
You will also need a pot and a fermentation vessel.
Step 2: Prepare:
First a word on pots, or as we call them, boil kettles. You will need a kettle big enough for a 5 gallon batch. This means 5 gallons, plus the water you will lose while boiling, plus some headspace to prevent a boil over. Somewhere around 32 Quarts is good for our purposes. The kettle should be stainless not aluminum, This is a good size for 10 gallon batches.
Other optional features:
valve at the bottom
volume markings up the side
sight glass, temp gauge etc.
So to start off, let’s heat up some water. I used about 6.5 gallons, expecting to lose about 1.5 gallons to the 60 minute boil. I use a propane burner outside. Cover the pot and allow the water to heat to a boil while the ingredients are prepared.
Prepare the ingredients:
1. Wash the ginger in the sink. You do not need to peel it.
2. Drop the ginger it in a food processor.
3. Juice your lemons and lime.
Step 3: The Boil:
Once the water is boiling, you can add the ginger and the sugar, After the ginger is added, Slowly stir in the turbinado sugar. (What you do not want, is to dump the sugar in all at once and have it burn on the bottom of the pot.) Once the ginger and sugar are in, set your timer for 60 minutes. While your brewing you can be cleaning out the fermentation vessel
And now back to the boil: The last minute or so, you can throw in the whirl floc. This will help “clear” the beer. It does not effect the taste and is not required. You can also add the yeast nutrients if you are going to.
Step 4: The cool down and pitch
I like to cool my wort as fast as possible. You can use an immersion chiller or a counter flow chiller, which is what I have. If you don’t have a chiller, dump it into the fermenter until it reaches room temp.
I use a little spray bottle with star-san and water to spray any surfaces or tools I am touching at this point. Once the wort is in the fermenter, toss in the yeast and stick in the airlock. By the next morning it will be bubbling away happily. If you want, you can take a before and after fermentation reading to calculate the alcohol content. Mine ended up at 9.5.
After days or weeks the fermenter will stop bubbling. At this point I added a Campden tablet to kill the yeast and then back-sweetened with simple syrup. If you do not back-sweeten, the ginger beer will be VERY dry. The champagne yeast is much more aggressive then the ale yeasts I am used to and will feed on every bit of sugar in the wort.
At this point I kegged the ginger beer and let it carbonate for 6 or 7 days. Overall, it was very gingery, which I liked, but I feel the citrus was lost in the fermentation. If I do it again, I will add the citrus after fermentation, when I keg.
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