The Ongoing Adventures with Ginger.

Ginger is one of those ingredients that I like to use sparingly since it has such a strong delicious flavour.  There is one exception to this and that is Ginger Beer.  When we were in the UK for my cousins wedding we came across Crabbies Alcoholic Ginger Beer.  It was the best ginger beer that I had ever tasted and it was alcoholic.  I started having one almost every evening while we were there which is almost unheard of for me, especially at the time since I drank maybe once or twice a month.  

So my husband was having a hankering for Crabbies and we aren't in the UK or apparently Edmonton, which is the only place in Canada that I have seen it.  I would love to get my hands on some but none of my local liquor stores have been able to bring it in, either that or it was too much effort.  Any who, my husband had a hankering and ginger is stupidly cheap in Chinatown so he decided to make his own.  

My husband doesn't do anything half assed, he goes the whole ass.  He didn't just do one batch, he did 4 different batches varying the percentage of white sugar to brown sugar.  He looked at a whole bunch of recipes on line and decided that they didn't ask for enough ginger.  We had done a bunch of batches of ginger concentrate to make ginger ale, so he knew he wanted at lot of ginger in the beer rather then the 1-4 tbsp that most recipes called for.  He ended up using around 400grams of ginger to 2 cups of sugar.

All in all he had 4 batches, 100% white sugar, 100% brown sugar, 50/50 white brown (which is currently my favorite but so far we have tried only 2 of the 4 batches), 25% brown.  

The idea behind this is that this will lead to making bigger batches to put in a keg to then put in the kegerator.  I don't drink beer and that is all that the kegerator has held to date.  Cider is hard to get in the smaller kegs and usually only available to commercial clients (which we are not, although I am sure the we go through more beer then some places, 2 every 2 weeks.)

There are 2 different applications of ginger in this recipe.  First is the ginger which is put through the food processor and then boiled with the water and sugar for 2 hours and then strained.

Here is the chunked ginger ready to go in the bot for boiling.

After it is boiled and strained it is added to the sterilized jugs.  The water is added to thin out the concentrated ginger. 

Then he grates up some ginger to extract the juice from the ginger.

Then the ginger juice is added to the concentrate to add some fresh ginger bite.

Her are the jugs ready for yeast and then it will be time from them to sit and  let the yeast do its thing in the bathtub downstairs, just in case it decides to runneth over :)

After the yeast has does its job, J tasted it and decided it needed more sugar, so he added more sugar and then bottled it into smaller jugs that were sealed and left to carbonize.  

So far we have tasted 2 of the batches and my favorite is the 50/50 blend.

I will post the recipe when we have decided on the perfect ginger beer recipe.