#ginger-beer

Back for Seconds Article by: allie albanese Photos by: Carolyn sims Bourbon, pineapple, and ginger oh my! Usher in Spring with this tasty Bourbon-based Back for Seconds tipple. JUMP TO RECIPE CARD Whoooooooo’s ready for a cocktail?! I am, I am! And this delicious sip created by Carolyn is one I guarantee you’ll be making on repeat. Personally, I’m a Bourbon drinker all year long, so mixing…

...and chatting to friends.

One of them was Angus Craigie, one of the makers of Craigie's Cider, (not an ad, but Supporting Local Industry - easily done considering that it's a very, very good cider!) and the talk turned to ginger-beer, by which I meant proper ginger-beer made with ginger, not grain beer with ginger in it.

I'd just had a bottle of that, it wasn't as good as it could have been, and I was nattering to Angus about how it could be improved, and how proper ginger-beer was a proper grown-up drink and not the "lashings of ginger-beer" kiddie pop consumed in Enid Blyton stories.

The Friday evening after that, we found this :-D...

O-kay, game on. (And I kept my reflex copy-editing under control, too...)

Now, the last time we made ginger-beer at home, we used a recipe that featured the magic phrase "do not make this stuff, it is dangerous." How could we resist? It was successful, safer than expected because we used swing-cap bottles whose stoppers would let go before the bottles went bang, but exciting enough for Mr Squeak...

...who got a nine-bottle salute from the second-fermentation rack as he was ambling through the front hall, and shot into the living-room with his eyes like saucers and every hair on end (which on a Norwegian Forest Cat is quite something to see - he looked like a giant alarmed powderpuff.)

There was a puddle in the hall, and we thought the obvious until we discovered it was ginger-beer, later tested to be 9.5% abv...

Never mind a fairy-tale goose that lays golden eggs, if you have a real-life cat who pees high-strength beer what do you do? You give him plenty to drink, that's what you do...

Since nothing on the Net is ever truly lost, we tracked down the original recipe: it's Nathan's Ginger Beer, preserved on the aptly named Cats Meow 3 archive of brewery.org, and it has even more warnings than we remembered, like for instance - "Chill and test open 1 bottle each week until they start to scare you..."

How could we resist (part 2)?

Yes, those are 3 litre plastic milk-jugs. They won't explode, since the caps don't fit as tightly as demijohn bungs, and the fermentation bubblers are intended to, well, bubble. Which is exactly what they're doing right now, sitting in a spill-catcher because You Never Know...

The really fun part starts next week, because that's when the ginger-beer gets racked off into bottles and put out into the cool of the boot-room to build up a proper fizz. We used champagne yeast, not lager yeast, so both the fizz and the alcohol content should be quite something.