Spicy Ginger Lemonade (big OG)

[rugbrod]

So after a semi-successful lemonade (rather, a lemon wine), and a currently-conditioning ginger beer (Kingsley Phillips' recipe), I decided to crack on with another non-beer brew.

I've combined the best of both worlds here and ended up with a bit of a monster... fingers crossed it eventuates to something amazing.

As shown below, Instead of slicing the lemons, I've cut the rind off about 2/3 of them and then juiced them all. This took a little longer, but it should result in a little bit less of the bitter pith taste that I got in the other one.

Recipe:
- lemon juice from 4kg of lemons (around 1.3L)
- the rind of 2/3 of those lemons, blanched
- 1.5kg soft brown sugar
- 250g fresh ginger (diced finely, with as much skin as possible removed)
- 250g honey
- 2 chilis, sliced
- 2 tsp nutmeg
- 2 tsp ground ginger
- 2 tsp cinnamon

Method:

Boil 3L water in the kettle, then pop that into a big pot on the stove (not on the heat yet though)

Dissolve the sugar and honey in the water and begin to prep everything.

Get the mix to a rolling boil and put all of the rest of the ingredients (except the lemon juice) into the pot and keep on a low rolling boil.

After 20 mins, take it off the heat and cool down in the sink (fill sink with cold water and place the pot into that to get it closer to room temp.

Strain the liquid into FV and then put the solid material back into the pot - add another litre of hot water to "sparge" and drain this into the FV too.

Add the lemon juice to the FV and top up with water to 10L

Pitch yeast when under 25, preferably at 22.

This one ended up with a HUGE OG of 1.068. I've pitched some leftover trub from the previous ginger beer, and its frothing away nicely in my coopers craft fv. Hopefully be done in a couple weeks, but I may have to leave it for three. Temp will sit around 18-20 degrees.

Cheers!

[rugbrod]

Well well well, this brew has dropped to an SG of 1.013 after 11 days (7.2% by my count)

I'll check in again in a few days as it's super sweet, so probably got a fair bit left in the fermentable sugar department.

I'm interested to see what it ends up at!

[amberfiend]

looks pretty interesting, will be watching this one to see how it goes yeah

[rugbrod]

Finally bottled it up. FG hit 0.995 in the end for an approx ABV of 9.5% (and maybe hitting 10% in the bottles!!!). The attenuation was pretty good in my opinion for a second use of a tin yeast!

I don't mind how it tastes out of the fermenter, but I definitely know for next time to balance the lemon and ginger a bit better! The lemon overtakes the ginger beer for the most part.

I enjoyed the experiment though, and will be keen to throw down some more stuff like this soon so it's ready for summer.

Now we wait for a few weeks before I try it properly!

Edited September 11, 2020 by rugbrod

[rugbrod]

This has come out really tasty after 2 weeks in the bottles.

Super cloudy and it really doesn't taste like 10% alcohol either.

I'll definitely be keeping a few of these for long term storage to see how they develop.