The ginger beer has been bottled!

Ginger beer round 2 happened and I'm hoping to find it wildly (not mildly) successful. We chose a recipe from Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentationand brewed ourselves a good 4 gallons of ginger beer on New Year's day, my drink of choice. Great way to start 2012!

 Essentially, it went like this:

Per every gallon of water boil 1 oz ginger (plus extra for zing), 1 pound sugar, and juice of 1 lemon for one hour. When it has cooled to ~70 F, strain out the ginger, skim any scum, and pitch the activated yeast (guy at the brew store recommended cuvee yeast). Ferment until it's done working, about 2 weeks. After fermenting this batch for nearly 3 weeks we decided to take the next step though I think it still could have fermented a bit longer because of the cool temps. As it was, we primed the batch with 3/4 c sugar dissolved in 1 pint of boiling water and bottled it up after sanitizing our equipment. I think we ended up with a couple dozen 22oz bottles of the brew and even uncarbonated it tasted quite delicious. Overall the taste is good-- light and sweet, a refreshing drink. Lessons learned? I'm glad the aluminum pot we scoured with the brew (oops!) failed to leave a tinny aftertaste we worried about, and next time I'd triple the ginger as I like a good gingery bite. Otherwise this is a simple recipe I'll likely return to it for building my own flavor profile in the future. Oh, I forgot to mention that it's 4.07% alcohol by volume (my original calculation was wrong).

Looking forward to trying something like this soon.... a ginger soda more than beer with various spices.


PS. I'm in the market for a new camera since mine is lost. Any recommendations? I'm trying to decide if I should upgrade to DSLR or stick with my standard Canon elph point-and-shoot cameras for ease and portability. It's a tough decision. Many thanks to Michael for his cell phone pictures in the meantime...