Description
The Morgans Ginger Beer is a fully malted carbonated ginger beer that is flavoured primarliy with the ginger extract in the Morgans Ginger Beer kit. The kit includes a 500gm malt pack, an additional 1kg of dextrose/glucose, as well as a premium S-04 Yeast to give it the alcoholic kick that makes it a fully malted ginger beer.
Ginger Beer Recipe Variations
Ginger beer recipes are for you to apply and customise to your own tastes, and may it you own. Its easy to manipulate and change up your recipe, and almost impossible to make an error. Things you can do to increase the flavours and body of your beer
- To make it a dry ginger beer, simply omitting the included sweetener sachet in the brewcraft ginger beer pack, if you like it extra dry add a dry enzyme (will help break down the complex sugars and the yeast will consume as much as possible, note this will kick the % up a few 0.1 points)
- if you like a sweeter ginger beer, but do not like the artificial sweetener, simply add 500-1kg of lactose instead to your brewcraft ginger beer recipe kit
- Increase the ginger intensity of your ginger beer recipe by adding more or less fresh grated ginger (remember to get fresh ginger and to bring to the boil and simmer for 2 mins to release the flavours and kill and natural yeasts)
- Alternatively, add your freshly grated ginger to a cup of neat alcohol, brandy or sherry and pour the contents through a strainer, adding the liquid to the fermenter
- Make a fantastic ginger mead by simply adding 1kg of pure clean honey to the fermenter instead of glucose, avoid eucalyptus varierties and if possible aim for clover honey or orange blossum (remember to disolve the honey in 2L of water and bring to boil before adding to your fermenter). Please remember honey is a complex sugar and will take longer to ferment out
- If you want to change up the yeasts, a highly recommended strain is the Wine yeast – Vintners Harvest SN9 AP/cider 8g, we sell this to our commerical Ginger Ale brewers
- Increase the Alcohol Content, is very easy, basic thumb rule is for every additional 1kg of glucose added will increase the alcohol content by approx. 2.5%. But, it will increase the fermentation time frame. Similarly for every 1kg of Light Malt Dry Extract will increase the alcohol content by approx 1.6% and will increase body aswell as taste
- Increase the body of the beer with out increasing alcohol %, simply add 250-500gm of dry corn syrup, it is unfermentable by will reduce the thin watery mouth feeling of a young green ginger beer
Fermentation Process Explained
Fermentation is the process whereby yeast consumes sugars (glucose/dextrose, malt extracts, honeys … anything with carbohydrates). Most yeasts will ferment when the fermentable liquid is warm (15-30C), with the exceptions of some speciality yeast strains. The yeast can continue fermenting until it hits a alcohol barrier, whereby the yeast has produced so much alcohol that it can not produce any more, even though there could be more carbohydrates to consume. This alcohol % barrier is different for all different strains of yeast but a a rule of thumb between 12-15% alcohol content.
During fermentation the yeast feeds on the carbohydrates and produces a substantial amount of gas as a by product along with the alcohol, this is a good thing and its they way we carbonate our drinks (make them fizzy), but we only want to have a little bit of carbonation in our drinks. So it is important that we let our beer, wine or spirit to ferment out completely in the fermenter, in the case of beer, ginger beer or cider we add additional sugars to our bottles after fermentation to carbonate our drinks after all the gas has escaped in the fermenter. When you cool your beer, ginger beer or cider in the fridge, the yeast goes dormant and stops or slows fermenting, but will mature and intensify with flavours with aging.
As there is a secondary fermentation in your bottles to recarbonate your beer, ginger beer or cider, we get a sediment at the bottom of each bottle, it is safe to drink this and is actually good for you (full of vitamins), simply ‘gently’ roll the bottle and gently mix the sediment through your beer. Alternatively, pour your beer into a glass and decant your beer of the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Please note that this secondary ferementation will increase your overall alcohol content by 0.5%, if you skip the fermentation process if you will to make a non-alcoholic drink you will have a very small % of alcohol.
