Understanding ginger beer

[FireFury]

I've not done any home brewing before, but want to get started with some ginger beer. I've heard a fair few stories of explosions, so I want to make sure I understand properly before I start.

The basic proceedure seems to be ferment in a fermentation bin until fermentation stops, prime, then bottle. I think I understand how this works with ales/lagers (yeast ferments until the sugar is used up and then stops, priming adds a bit more sugar to ferment in order to pressurise the bottle; fermentation stops again once the priming sugar is used up). However, I can't figure out how this works for sweet drinks such as ginger beer (and I've done a lot of googling to try and find out :) - the drink is sweet, so the yeast hasn't run out of sugar; we get a fizzy drink after priming and bottling, so the yeast presumably hasn't reached its alcohol tolerance, so what stops the fermentation after the bottle has pressurised rather than just keeping on going until it explodes?

 

[Laurin]

There is a couple of different things you can do.

- Make it really strong so the yeast gets killed by to much alcohol. Which is quite high depending on the yeast and not very reliable.
- Use non fermentable sugars/sweeteners such as Splenda, lactose, etc. Lots of people go with Splenda or other artificial sweeteners.
- After you primed let it carbonate for a bit and then leave it somewhere cool. The yeast will still work but very slowly. The colder the
slower. The CO2 will also be absorbed better by cold liquids. Obviously you can't store it for ages because at some point the yeast will
have produced too much CO2.
- Just use soda pop bottles or other PET bottles which had anything sparkling in it. If you feel they are getting too hard you can release
the pressure.

Hope that helps. I just left my bottles at around 16C and never had any explosions (yet). Just leave them somewhere where they could make a mess, just in case and cover them with something so you wont have ginger fountains.

 

[FireFury]

Make it really strong so the yeast gets killed by to much alcohol. Which is quite high depending on the yeast and not very reliable.

That would presumably prevent the priming from working (since the yeast will have already been killed off by the alcohol)?

Just use soda pop bottles or other PET bottles which had anything sparkling in it. If you feel they are getting too hard you can release the pressure.

Yeah, I've decided that I'll be using PET bottles in any case because I don't much like the idea of potential exploding glass. :) I guess this just means I need to check them every so often (what happens when PET bottles over-pressure? Do they just pop their screw-tops?)

Hope that helps. I just left my bottles at around 16C and never had any explosions (yet). Just leave them somewhere where they could make a mess, just in case and cover them with something so you wont have ginger fountains.

Thanks for the reply, very helpful.