The Guildford Ginger

Would you believe it? We made some more beer last night! (And this after me being ill for nearly a week. I haven’t drunk a drop for well over a week, but brewing still has to be done!)

Yesterday’s brew was an interesting one. We wanted to make a Ginger Beer. That’s a beer flavoured with ginger, as opposed to one of those gassy sweet drinks that actually don’t have anything to do with malt and beer (although I do quite like them).

Andy’s very keen on Marble Brewery’s Ginger – a strong bitter with a hell of a fiery ginger kick. So we decided to formulate our own recipe. This really was stabbing in the dark (if you google “ginger beer recipe”, as you can imagine you get a lot of recipes for sweet gassy stuff).

So here’s what we aimed for. We wanted strong, fairly malty and well bittered. So the grains were pale ale malt, biscuit malt and a bit of crystal malt. For the hops, we used target (for bitterness), challenger and goldings (for English flavour and aroma).

But how much ginger to put in? Well we had no idea, so we just took a guess. Andy bought a kilogram of root ginger, which once trimmed and blended to a pulp made about 800g. We put it into the boil for 30 mins.

This is the fun of brewing. Now that we’ve got a basic grip of the sort of things that you have to do we are now mucking about with recipes to see what happens. Andy’s big worry is not that it will be overpowering, but more that it will be insipid and not gingery enough. We’ll have to wait and see. If this happens, we have a plan for a second ginger addition after fermentation.

Given the horrible cold I’ve been left with after last week’s illness, I could do with something really fiery to clear my airways! :-)

First Gold

Last Monday we brewed another batch of beer. “Not more!” I hear you shouting, “that's two batches in two weeks!”

Well, yes, it is, but there’s method in our alcoholism. Andy has always been strongly of the view that our beers are much better if allowed to mature in the cask for several weeks (at least 3, ideally 4-6) before we start drinking them. The problem is that, well, frankly, we need beer to drink. So casks were getting started and drunk before they reached this level of maturity.

The only practical solution we could come up with was to do an extraordinary general brewday, to give us one extra batch in hand. (Great excuse, don’t you love it??)

So what did we brew? Well I have always liked Badger beers, and one of the best I’ve had is First Gold. This is named after the single hop variety that is used to make it. First Gold is an English hop variety, so if you are a regular reader you will know that means herbal, earthy and fruity flavours. Having said that I have seen tasting notes saying it has “an added extra citrus quality” and “an orangey quality”.

Sounds good! We were not trying to replicate the Badger beer entirely, so we used the “standard” malt bill we use for a hop trial. 91% pale ale malt and 9% biscuit malt. Nice and simple.

It has just finished fermenting and I have added “dry hops” to the fermenter (See All about Hops). At the moment they are all floating on the surface of the beer because they are so incredibly light. But they smell fantastic! I’m trying to think of a way of getting them to sink into the beer without resorting to stirring it (which involves putting a spoon in the beer so could risk infection). Any suggestions?