Upping the ABV%

[Tutelage]

I am brewing a ginger beer this week and will be wanting one batch for easy drinking at about 4% and one batch that is ridiculously high %, as high As I can get essentially. I normally brew ginger beer with fairly generic 'Youngs Cider Yeast' or Ale yeast, and occasionally youngs wine yeast (I save better yeasts for beers).

I will be producing ~10 gallon batch split into a 8gall normal beer and 2 gallon high %.

My questions is really is it better to add fermentables to the high % brew all in one lump, say enough to take it to 15% after fermentation, and risk yeast dying out, or to add the fermentable in 1-2% batches bumping the SG up to 1.020 everytime it drops to 1.005 (or less) assuming fermentables have been sterilised.

I have a feeling that the second is more time consuming but much more likely to succeed, but may lead to the yeast taking forever to grow to sufficient anti-bacterial quantities, wheras first may shock the yeast or dehydrate them and causing a stuck fermentation.

 

[Tim_Crowhurst]

I would treat the high-ABV brew as a wine. Start off with an SG of around 1080, then increase in .020 stages with sugar syrup. That way the brew will hit 10% ABV within the first week, which will minimise your infection risk.

You might want to be a little more generous with the ginger as well, since fermentation will use up some of the flavour compounds.

 

[Brewtrog]

You should be easily able to get the yeast up to 18% abv as long as you add the sugar in stages. An easy rule of thumb method of this (avoiding having to get an sg every time) is to dissolve 2 parts sugar in 1 part water and adding 150 ml of this syrup every three days.

 

[bigboots]

Brewtrog...........is 150ml for 1gallon or 5? Thankyou. I'm guessing 1?

 

[Brewtrog]

1 gallon yeah, you might want to check if the scaling of the maths works in real life though.