There is something rather refreshing about a ginger beer, especially on a hot summers day. A few months back I combined a Coopers lager tin with some fresh ginger. Although gingery flavoured, it was not a beer that you could have many of due to the high alcohol content. When poured it had almost zero head and needed to be very cold to hold back some of the harsh aftertaste. Rather than trying the beer+ginger approach I though I would give a dedicated ginger beer can a go.

There seems to be two main ginger beer brew cans out there, Coopers and Brigalow. The Coopers cans seem to be favoured on many forums, but my local brewing shop (Bin Inn Lincoln Road) only had Brigalow in stock. The back of the can has recipies for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic variants, essentially with and without sugar added. I went for somewhere in the middle using 500g of sugar. All going well this should be just under 2% once the priming sugar is included. One of the major complaints about the Brigalow brew is the lack of body. To help counteract this I have used the darkest sugar I could find, Billington’s Molasses.

Into the brewing drum:

• 900g can of Brigalow Ginger Beer
• 500g Billington’s Molasses
• 4g ‘Yeast Nutrient’ sachet from the can
• 5g Yeast sachet from the can
• Enough water to make 23L

The yeast nutrient was a white powder that I suspect is just sugar to help get the yeast going when brewing the non-alcohol recipe. Probably not much use when there is sugar added also, but I figured it can’t hurt. The OG was 1010, so assuming it gets down to 1000 or so should give an alcohol content of about 1.3%. The final brew is very dark coloured, hopefully some of that remains in the glass.

Now for the two weeks or so before bottling.

Bottling update, 15 Jan

Brewing was faster than I was anticipating, likely due to the smaller amount of sugar added and also the smaller size of the can giving less sugars to consume. FG measured as 1000, giving an alcohol content of about 1.4% once the priming sugar is included. The taste of the beer is encouraging, although rather sweet because of the artificial sweeteners included. Hopefully this subsides slightly as the bottles condition.

Tasting Update, March

This brew turned out BAD. The only thing I could taste was the artificial sweeteners which taste awful. The entire batch has now become drain cleaner.