The Ginger Ninja: A delightful alcoholic ginger beer
As one of my early brews, I decided to make an alcoholic ginger beer. This may also be where I got my first taste for adding to the extract kits to modifying and improve the taste.
In this case, I kept my tinkering fairly simple, by simply boiling freshly sliced ginger in about a litre of water and substituting this for a litre of the water added to the extract kit in the fermentation barrel. My main reason for adding the ginger was to increase the ginger bite - it also apparently increased the alcohol content! This second point is what got it christened ‘The Ginger Ninja’ since it was easy to sip and went down rather easily (once properly aged), but quite quickly sneaked up and made its presence know through a slight inebriated feeling.
This little experiment also became a testament to the virtue of good ageing as it really came into its own after 6-months plus of bottle conditioning. This mellowed the flavour nicely and made it a bit crisper with a clean, ginger taste. Some of last few bottles recently got opened at a brewing party and it ended up being unanimously voted as the un-official best beer of the party. I’ll share the recipe shortly for those who are interested.