So, my fiancee and I went to a homebrew event and someone was serving ginger beer. My fiancee, a big ginger lover, tasted it and wanted it at the wedding but with more ginger. After doing some half-gallon test runs, the guy was nice enough to give me MOST of his recipe, we finally came up with a recipe she liked…remember she likes ginger
5 gallon batch:
10 lb of ginger simmered for 45 minutes
juice from 5 lemons
10 cups of sugar
US-05
I waited a week and tried some. It is at 6% ABV and taste good. Very spicy but good. The problem is the after taste. It has this gingerly bitter after taste. It has been in the primary for only a week. Any suggestions on how to get rid of it? May it disappear in a month? I need to serve it on 7/26 so any help will be appreciated. This aftertaste was not there for the test batches.
Yes, that’s a lot of ginger! I brew a recipe that has ginger in it that uses3 lbs of ginger … but for a 310 gallon batch. So I imagine that is extremely spicy. And it makes me wonder if that is not too much all together. In my beginning days of homebrewing I used to make a ginger beer (with a 1.050 SG recipe, malt, not sugar) and I seem to recall using ab out a pound per 5 gallons and the ginger taste being very pronounced and spicy hot.
All that said, you may do better by processing the ginger differently. I have found the best way to get the ginger flavor in the beer is to add some boiling wort to the hand chopped ginger near the end of the boil and pulverize it in the food processor then add it at whirl pool. You might also actually consider using a beer base (malt) rather than a sucrose base.
Did you peel the ginger root before simmering it? Some have said that the ginger root will mellow out a bit if you let it dry for a few days after peeling before brewing with it. Just some thoughts…