Gingered Ale

My wife is a huge fan of ginger, and when I started brewing, she was flipping though my Dad’s old copy of Papazian, and found the “Vagabond Gingered Ale” recipe. Hence, we dove into that batch and out came a dark brown beer with some ginger flavor. While it was nice, I wanted to give it another shot with something that would be more conducive to summer drinking at Pennsic 35. Thus, I played with the grains, swapped out some of the malt extract between dark and light, and upped the ginger content. The results were quite refreshing and very nice to drink.

Ingredients

  • 3.5 lbs Amber Malt Extract
  • 2.5 lbs Dry Light English Malt Extract
  • 2 lbs Crystal Malt
  • 2 oz Cascade Hops (boiling)
  • 1 oz Willamette hops (finishing)
  • 2 Hands Freshly Grated Ginger
  • 1 pack German Ale Yeast (#1007)

Method

Crack or lightly grind the grains (I used the food processor for this one). Place the grains in a pot and cover them with water. Bring them up to around 150 degrees, and hold at that temperature for at least 10 minutes, then bring to a boil. Sparge the grains into another pot, and run water though them until you have 3 gallons of water. Bring to the foam break, then add the boiling hops. Boil for another 55 minutes, then add the finishing hops. Boil for another 5 minutes, then add to your fermenter with either 2 gallons of water or 1 gallon of water and 8-10 lbs of ice.

Notes

Origional Gravity = 1.037
Final Gravity = 1.010 on day 12

The recipe suggests 2 hands of ginger. That means, go find some ginger root at the store. You’ll see it’s sold by the pound, and you can get bunches of the tuber looking stuff pretty reasonably. Get 2 roots about the size of your own hand. If you like ginger, go a bit more; if you don’t, go a bit less. I then ran all the ginger though a microplane grater to get it nice and chopped up. I think surface area is key, so really get it small to get the most flavor out of your ginger.

In the end, I didn’t filter it before bottling. This left little pieces of ginger floating, that settled out in the bottle. I was ok with that, and just left that as sediment at the bottom of the bottle, but others might want to filter that out.

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