Ginger beer help

[Bogwoppit]

Hi All,

I'm trying to make a ginger beer at the moment and I need a little advice as it's not going great.

To start I mashed 5kg of maris otter and then added a 1.5kg can of malt extract and about 2lbs of grated fresh root ginger to the boil with a few challenger hops and boiled for an hour.
This left me with 24 litres at about 1.055. I fermented this with ws005 (I think) and it went down to 1.012. I tasted it and it was very "thin", there was no body to it at all and very little taste of ginger.
Basically it wasn't very nice so I had to make a few additions.
I added 200g of dextrose, 500g of lactose (after doing a bit of online reading into ginger beer recipes) and 5 teaspoons of dried ginger.
This brought it up to 1.020, gave it a great kick in the ginger department (like a boot in the face!) and a much more rounded taste.

However, after nearly 2 weeks in the fermenter it is still at 1.018.
The question is; is this too high a gravity to bottle/keg (I want to put some in a mini keg).
If it's ok to bottle how much priming sugar should I use?
If it's not ok to bottle what do I do?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Bw

[Hop Bomb]

Northern Brewer have a handy priming sugar calculator:

http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator/

Il leave the rest of the stuff to someone with better brewing knowledge than me. For what its worth I just kegged an APA at 1.015 (thanks kevco for the c02)

[Kevco5]

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong as i've never used it but I think the addition of lactose would have added to your gravity reading and seeing as it doesn't ferment you should be safe to bottle. The 2 point drop in gravity (1.020 - 1.018) would have been from the 200gm of dextrose fermenting out.

I'd have no fear of bottling this now, providing the gravity hasn't changed in the last 3 days or so!
Here's a handy tool for carbonation
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

Kev

[Will_D]

IIRC: 500 gms of lactose will give you about 10 points of unfermentable body.

[Will_D]

Another suggestion is to prime up a 500 mL Lucozade Sports bottle. Add sugar (same as for the 500 mL bottles) fill to about an inch from the top of the neck squeeze out the air and cap tightly.

Shake to disolve the sugar. Put with rest of bottles in warm place.

Then you can monitor progress easily. It will start to go a bit more cloudy, the bottle will firm up, maybe even get hard. Then the beer clears and you can see the yeast settle out. Then you know that carbing has finished so then off to the cool. You can also monitor conditioning by takes sneak sips from the bottle!

If the bottle starts to visibly swell then you know you've over carbed so it time to chill the bottles way down and recap them.

Let us know what happens

I love GB

[Greg2013]

I have two demijohns of ginger beer sitting on the table in front of me as i type, still in primary, no grain receipe from a m8 in UK on youtube,smells stunning, OG was 1060.


What will d said above sounds like a plan to me

[Bogwoppit]

Interesting stuff on the effect of the lactose on the gravity, makes sense.

What Will says is pretty much what I was thinking in my head so I'll give it a go this weekend.

Fingers crossed.

Thanks All

[Bogwoppit]

I bottled the beer on saturday with 2oz of dextrose and it went into the bottom of the hot press which keeps it at 16-18C.
The plastic bottle is now nicely firm but with enough give to stop me worrying.
5L went into a mini keg which seems to be ok too so far.
I'll give it a little longer before I move it into cold storage (the front room!).

Hopefully it tastes ok now.

Bw