Ginger Beer Homebrew Kits

Brewing ginger beer at home

Ginger beer is the one kit in the shop that does two completely different jobs. Ferment it out and you have a semi-sweet alcoholic ginger beer. Stop it early and you have a fizzy soft drink at around 0.5% or less, which is why this is the kit people brew with their kids.

The kits

• Old Fashioned Ginger Beer. The traditional one. Made with the Blend #20 pack and 1kg of dextrose it produces a semi-sweet alcoholic ginger beer of about 4.5%.
• Buderim Ginger Beer Brew Kit. Made with Australian Buderim ginger. Also available as a Complete Brew Kit with the supporting gear.
• The Double Ginger Brew Pack. Buderim and Old Fashioned together, for comparing the two styles side by side.
• Buderim Double Pack. Two Buderim kits.
• AHB Starter Ginger Beer Making Kit. The full setup with a twin-lever capper and the Buderim kit, for someone starting from nothing.

Alcoholic or soft drink

The difference is simply how far you let the fermentation run. For an alcoholic ginger beer, ferment until it stops, then let it settle and clear for 48 hours before bottling. For a soft drink, you are using fermentation only to make a little gas, and leaving plenty of sugar behind for sweetness.

We have a recipe for each. The ginger beer recipe is the soft drink version, and the hard ginger beer recipe takes it through to the alcoholic one.

You will need a 25 or 30 litre fermenter and enough bottles for 20 litres.

The safety point worth reading twice

If you are making the soft drink version, do not let the yeast use up all the sugar. Beyond losing the sweetness, the pressure builds, and the ginger beer will either blow out of the bottle the moment you open the cap or burst the bottle in storage. Use screw-top plastic soft drink bottles rather than glass for the non-alcoholic version, and check them by squeezing. When a bottle is firm, refrigerate it to slow the yeast down.

Sweetening

Lactose is a non-fermentable sweetener, so the yeast cannot touch it. It is about half as sweet as sugar, and you can add more or less to taste. This is how you get a sweet ginger beer that is still safe to bottle.

Make it yours

Ginger beer takes to tinkering better than almost anything else we sell. Alter the ingredients or add something extra and you will almost certainly end up with a tastier, more satisfying result, and a recipe you can genuinely call your own.

Ships Australia-wide from our Melbourne store. Ask us if you want a hand pitching it sweeter or drier.