back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

Cracked open a couple of bottles of Batch 2 Gold today whilst watching the rugby.

Gold blend is the beefier blend with extra ginger and lemon from lemon rind.

1st bottle was nicely bright. Big flavour; good ginger but the lemon is little bitter. It's giving a decent backbone to the taste but it's probably too much.

2nd bottle was a bit fiercer on the ginger and this helped with the overly bitter lemon. I also managed the sediment better when pouring.

So next Gold Blend probably has half the lemon. Need to have a think about counter-acting the bitterness but retaining the structure.

I'm making ginger beer and I'm experimenting with the recipe.

I have a 5 litre carboy and a few dozen assorted 500 mL bottles of Hacker Pschoor beer (now empty), which have a fliptop lid. Each batch of ginger beer is therefore approximately 5 litres or 10 bottles.

I have made one batch so far. Made to the recipe in the instructions that came with the carboy. Brewers yeast, lemon juice from a lemon juice bottle, 15 grams of ginger - leave to bottle ferment for 2 weeks.

Batch 1, tasted pretty decent. 1 bottle didn't fizz. The others had varying amounts of fizz from, not quite enough to over-flowing nay gushing. Dad commented positively on the couple of bottles I gave to him.

Batch 2 has now been bottled.

Batch 2 is a "Gold" Blend.

(Batches are named after the primary colour of the labels of the beer bottles. Weissbier is White, Muchen Gold is Gold and Kellerbier is Blue -eventually I am to keep the batches entirely in the right coloured bottles for each of recognition but we're not there yet.)

Gold Blend is intended to be a heftier blend. So 45g of ginger, the same brewers yeast and the lemon from steeping a cupful of dried lemon peel in warm water. More sugar than the previous batch. That was bottled on the 22nd.

Currently the Gold Blend of ginger beer is maturing - day 6 of that. Gold Blend involves more ginger (45g rather than 15g) the source of the lemon is steeping two litres of water with a cup of dried lemon rind and adding two tablespoons of brown sugar to the mix and then leaving the mixture overnight to ferment before bottling the next day.

Batch 3 ("White" Blend) is about to be bottled tonight.

Batch 3 has has a fermentation engine a ginger beer "plant". How much of a ginger beer plant we'll see. There's a technical difference in the composition of a ginger beer plant and left over sediment with some live yeast in - probably. So I'm thinking of this as a pseudo-ginger beer plant. A real ginger beer plant is a symbiotic structure of a yeast and a bacteria The plant was created by taking the sediment from Batch 1, feeding it with a teaspoon of sugar and ginger for every day for a few weeks. The initial plan had been to rinse that through a muslin cloth and use the liquid as the fermentation engine but that seemed to have not enough yeast in it. So I've added some of the sediment back to the carboy, left it to brew overnight and will bottle it shortly after posting this. With a little added sugar to the bottle. This will make it quite sugary. The balance of the recipe is lemon juice, added ginger.

Batch 4 (Blue Blend ) will be a return to the straight out of the packet recipe. Might try to do that tonight depending on what else is going on.

So that should give

Gold Blend - intended to be powerfully flavourful - testing for taste.

White Blend - testing mostly the fermentation power of the pseudo-ginger beer plant

Blue Blend - a control.

All maturing at the same time.

I have in reserve a boughten "ginger beer plant" but again I'm not sure whether this is a real ginger beer plant or just a collection of yeasts. We'll see how we get on with the sediment based pseudo-ginger beer plant and the pure brewers yeast variants.