The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Food & crafts => Home brewing => Topic started by: HesterF on November 23, 2013, 10:36:56 pm
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I need some top tips! The recipe I followed left it standing for a day after adding yeast to ferment (had to have it in front of the fire because the house is so cold, it was just sitting there) and then to bottle and drink fairly quickly. I bottled it last week and have just had two bottles explode in the cellar and the other two were leaking (which is why they hadn't exploded!). When I released them, they were under huge pressure (the lid of one exploded so high outside it took a couple of seconds to return to earth) and the beer tastes frankly awful although my four year old loves it (bad sign, it tastes like yeasty beer to me). So what do I need to do differently?
Thks!
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I have always found ginger beer is much more carbonated than any other homebrew. I advise releasing the pressure once a day and drinking it quite fast.
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We pasteurize our fresh apple juice in the bottle to stop it fermenting itself into cider. The pasteurization process kills the natural yeast that comes with the apples, so I just wonder whether or not by allowing your ginger beer just enough fermentation to give it some fizz and then pasteurize it, would that solve the problem of exploding bottles?
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Good thinking batman! The beer was certainly good when first bottled - far more drinkable than it was post-explosions! - so if I can stop time by pasteurising it, I'll give it a go. Pasteuriser going into work as a mulled wine vessel shortly but once its duty there is done, I'll try another batch of ginger beer.
H
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To stop the continued fermentation
Use less sugar , or a lot more water and use a low alcohol yeast . Keep the bottles cool below the fermentation temperatures .
You could use old champagne bottles from a hotel / wedding reception place and buy some new plastic push in corks and wires . To wire the Ginger Beer in ... makes a great spicy tingly drink after the cork is popped .
Kill the yeast by heating to 90 OF for about 60 seconds or add Campden tablets
Look up " The Pearson Square " wrt wine & beer making you'll have a better idea of proportions of ingredients to use for a given ABV ( Alcohol By Volume )
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I had some nettle beer do the same thing! It exploded in a friends cupboard..first batch was ok though. Maybe pasteurisation the way forward. I'm always worried about too much glass nd hot water...don't know why. Doesn't help with sterilsing...lol :innocent:
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My parents always made ginger beer and had exploding problems occasionally until my Dad had the bright idea of jamming the bottles horizontally into a small stone window frame.....they still exploded but with added glass shrapnel! How it didn't have someone's eye out I don't know.
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Ouch! At least ours are well out of the way in the cellar - it's only the smell that gives it away (although the cellar is still flooded at the moment so it might be a better time to explode)
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It has just come back to me that when mum washed out the mother ginger beer plant she'd been feeding with a teaspoon of sugar and a tea spoon of ground ginger powder for a couple of weeks she used to dilute the fermentation to the recommended proportions which was quite weak . it would only have enough sugar inn it to make a small refernemtation ..
By the sounds of things all you exploding ginger beer folk have far too much sugar concentrated in your bottling liquid.
i'll see I fi can dig up a decent recipe that won't allow you to try and kill yourselfes with flying glass.
PS.
If you want a real kick in the ginger beer add a few drops of decent pungent chilli oil to the brew after it has done it's initial fermentation in the mother plant jar, when you have washed it out of the host plant and when you have put it to one side to ferment out for a week or so , before you bottle it up for the final weak secondary fermentation .
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My OH had explodes as well , he is banned from any more experiments .