Ginger beer

Background

While reading the books "Beer in the renaissance" and "Uncorking the past", it states that beer was considered the same as cooking (when it came to the household needs). Since they used what they could get their hands on to spice up their food one can assume that they did it with beer as well (which, in fact, is stated in "Uncorking the past").

With that in mind I started looking for what kind of spices that existed in Europe and thought to myself: Why not start to experiment with that? And the first spice I will use is ginger for the simple reason that I had it at home. As this very long, ongoing, never ending, project moves on I will use better yeast, better malt, hops and so on to get it more accurate I need to start somewhere. The yeast is one of the older yeast strains (old Irish yeast), the malt is also a fairly old one and roughly historical accurate so it will suffice for now.

The process:

I made a fairly simple beer: malt, yeast, two kinds of hops, Northen brewer 10,3% and Fuggle 5,0% and then added some ginger (for full recipe look in the recipe section: Re cipes).

The malt and the yeast that is being prepared in a very special, high tech bottle:

Heating up water and malt:

And now boiling it:

And now since it has fermented for a little while it is time to rack it!

And now it's in bottles:

It will be interesting to see the final results when they have rested a little while. Had to try a small sample and it had a rather distinct after taste to it which I guess is the ginger. Will bring it to the brewers guild meeting this weekend and see what they have to say.

Result: I probably should have used more ginger because there wasn't really a proper taste of ginger after a couple of days in bottles. Going to do it all over again soon to find the right amount.