Ginger beer

I was planning to go for a ride last night, but as the afternoon wore on the weather got more and more humid as the clouds grew dark & heavy. On the way home there was a sprinkling of rain and the promise of a storm to come, so I took the cowards / wise way out and decided to can the ride and make ginger beer instead.

The recipe was:-

1 1/2kg root ginger (peeled, which drops it to 900g, and then blended)
2 lemons, 2 limes all sliced in the skin
1kg raw sugar
1kg brown sugar
500g lactose (this won't ferment out and will leave some residual sweetness)
2 cinammon sticks
6 cloves
1 star anise
1 diced chilli (added 10 mins from the end of the boil)

The ingrediants (including the essential brewing aid of a glass of previous homebrew)

A bowl of gingery citrus goodness that you could use in a thai curry or a beer - after a pianful chilli-taste I ended up just using one. Did you know you can use a spoon to peel ginger? Pull the edge towards you and it pulls the skin off but leaves the ginger behind.

 The brew

Me discovering that vigourously boiling a pot of sugary goodness for an hour is not very cooling on a hot sticky night. But satisfying nontheless.

After an hour I cooled the wort slightly, sieved it and added it to water in the fermentor to bring it up to 22l (the water was treated with a campden tablet to try to eliminate the chlorine that I think has been supplying an unwanted backtaste to all of my beer). Once that cooled a bit I sprinkled an american ale yeast (S-05) directly on the surface of the wort and I was done. Well apart from all the cleaning, mopping & bin-emptying.....

All up it took an hour to peel the ginger (next time I'll prob buy pureed ginger) and then 2 1/2 hrs from first blend to final mop squeeze. The rain didn't come in the end, but it was still an evening well spent.