So, sorry if this shouldn't be here, I posted in the cider etc discussion but with no luck.
I've got 22l of ginger "beer" fermenting away quite happily, made with a huge amount of fresh ginger, raw cane and caster sugar, and a 1.5kg can of light malt extract, yeast is US-05. OG was 1.056 and I'm hoping it will get to around 1.010 before I bottle.
I'll bottle in a mix of 0.75 and 0.33l glass bottles, when making beer I just add a sugar solution made using a priming sugar calculator to the fermentor, mix, and then bottle, never had any problems carbonating this way.
But, I'd quite like the ginger beer to have a bit of sweetness. I'm trying to decide if it's better to use stevia to get to the sweetness that I want, and then add the priming suger, or if I should add extra sugar and then pasturise the bottles before it all gets eaten up by the yeast/the bottles explode and destroy my box room.
I did make cider once adding extra sugar and then pasturising (in a big pot with water around 65 degrees), and it worked fine, but I've honestly forgotten how I did it in terms of timing. I'm worried about using stevia because of possible nasty aftertastes. I did consider just adding priming sugar and then (when I open a bottle) adding a drop or two of simple sugar syrup, but I'd quite like to give bottles as gifts and I don't want it to be "ginger beer some assembly required".
Any advice would be much appreciated, preferably without needing to go for any speciality ingredients (I live in the Czech Republic and it's not great in terms of home brew supply).
I've got 22l of ginger "beer" fermenting away quite happily, made with a huge amount of fresh ginger, raw cane and caster sugar, and a 1.5kg can of light malt extract, yeast is US-05. OG was 1.056 and I'm hoping it will get to around 1.010 before I bottle.
I'll bottle in a mix of 0.75 and 0.33l glass bottles, when making beer I just add a sugar solution made using a priming sugar calculator to the fermentor, mix, and then bottle, never had any problems carbonating this way.
But, I'd quite like the ginger beer to have a bit of sweetness. I'm trying to decide if it's better to use stevia to get to the sweetness that I want, and then add the priming suger, or if I should add extra sugar and then pasturise the bottles before it all gets eaten up by the yeast/the bottles explode and destroy my box room.
I did make cider once adding extra sugar and then pasturising (in a big pot with water around 65 degrees), and it worked fine, but I've honestly forgotten how I did it in terms of timing. I'm worried about using stevia because of possible nasty aftertastes. I did consider just adding priming sugar and then (when I open a bottle) adding a drop or two of simple sugar syrup, but I'd quite like to give bottles as gifts and I don't want it to be "ginger beer some assembly required".
Any advice would be much appreciated, preferably without needing to go for any speciality ingredients (I live in the Czech Republic and it's not great in terms of home brew supply).
