Controlling secondary bottle fermentation to retain sugars

[pingbat]

I am new here and have some general brewing questions.

I am brewing a batch of ginger beer. I mostly used honey, sugar, lemon, fresh ginger, brewers yeast (from a kit).

My initial worry was to do with the temperature being a little high (34-36) when I added the yeast. I might get some funny notes to the beer but am not overly concerned. Now I am much more worried about the bottling stage. I need to ensure that I have enough sugar in there for gas production and that there is enough sweetness to the ginger beer.

I can think of a few ways to do this:

A) Wait for full fermentation, add non-fermentable sugar for taste, add fermentable sugar in precise amounts for gas, bottle.

B) Add fermentable sugar to taste, add the expected necessary amount of sugar to generate the appropriate amount of gas, bottle, use a pressure meter and halt fermentation once the desired pressure is reached. I was considering pasteurisation and refrigeration for this.

C) Get lazy, kill yeast, add sugar and use a soda syphon to add CO2.

Does anyone have any insight into what the best way to approach this is?

As we speak the brew is gurgling at me menacingly. I fear explosions.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

 

[pingbat]

I changed the thread title to make is more appealing. Apparently the prospect of Ginger Beer is not tempting enough.

 

[graysalchemy]

What ever fermentable sugar is left in a bottle will continue to ferment completely out and you will end up with a bottle bomb.

What you need to do is ferment out and then back sweeten with splenda or similar and then prime for bottling with about 5g/L of sugar.

Hope that helps

:thumb:

 

[calumscott]

+1 for Splenda!

Exactly what I did with mine and it is properly delicious and so easy to do. Splenda, due to its clever chemistry, doesn't have that awful saccharine/aspartame chemically aftertaste - which is actually really surprising if you can be bothered reading up on its composition!

Just prime as normal (go fizzy, 1tsp sugar per 500ml) and add the appropriate amount of splenda to taste - I ended up at 1.5tsp per 500ml and it's still very dry but that's to my taste.

 

[pingbat]

After a quick gander at the wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splenda, I notice that:

"Splenda usually contains 95% dextrose (D-glucose) and maltodextrin which the body readily metabolizes, combined with a small amount of mostly indigestible sucralose."
As far as I know dextrose is fermentable. The dextrose might only be in american version though. Can anyone confirm this?

The other alternative that has been mentioned is Agave syrup, has anyone tried this?

(Also, I live in Germany where Splenda is not readily available)

 

[calumscott]

It's the american version.

The UK version is maltodextrin as a bulking agent and 1% sucralose which is the sweetner.

Neither are readily fermentible.

I find it utterly hilarious that in the US 95% of an artificial sweetner is actually fully digestible sugar...

 

[calumscott]

It's the american version.

The UK version is maltodextrin as a bulking agent and 1% sucralose which is the sweetner.

Neither are readily fermentible.

I find it utterly hilarious that in the US 95% of an artificial sweetner is actually fully digestible sugar...

*ahem* Maltodextrin is, of course, fully digestible although not fermentible...

 

[pingbat]

Hmm, I have access to American Splenda but not the English one. Is there any way I can kill the yeast?

I'm less worried about gassing and much more worried about flavour. I can always gas with a soda syphon. I need to sweeten it though.