(The Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger bottles are both great for repurposing and accurately labeled, since I used triple the ginger as the recipe suggested!)

Follow up to the 1 gallon brewed extra strong ginger beer post:

I let it ferment in the carboy for three weeks before bottling, then added an ounce of sugar (I used Brewer’s Friend’s calculator) for recarbonation in the bottle. After two weeks bottled at room temperature, I put it in the fridge to cool and ultimately drink.

Now I’ve had it and it tastes like drinking raw ginger. Slightly alcoholic raw ginger, but I’m not sure if there’s a little boozey warmth or that’s just the overwhelming ginger burn. It’s very dry and actually pretty flat. I wonder if the flip top bottles I used maintain a good seal after reuse, or if I just didn’t add enough priming sugar.

To make it drinkable I have a few things I want to do:

• Dilute. I’m thinking of watering it down maybe by half to decrease the ginger-per-sip rate.
  
• Recarbonate. It’s flat, so I want to redo the carbonation process, likely with more sugar.
  
• Sweeten. I plan to cut bottle fermentation down to a week or so, possibly by pasteurization if I’m feeling dangerous, in order to keep some of the sugar in there.

But I am satisfied that I was able to make a strongly spiced brewed ginger ale! Hopefully it’ll be drinkable after the next steps, but experimentation is fun even without a product (I say that now, but not back when doing my thesis…)