we're going to make another strong ginger beer this time much more gingery than the last one I made a video of a lot more root ginger in this recipe I've got one kilo of pale malt extract a good two handfuls of root ginger and I'm also including some honey here about 410g just to give an extra depth of flavour as before, the first step is to chop up the ginger into smaller pieces and then we place it in the pestle and mortar and bash it out a little pour about a litre of boiling water from a kettle into our saucepan and then we can throw in all our chopped and bashed up ginger put the saucepan on the hob on a high heat we can add our honey obviously quite a bit of that is going to cling to the bowl so all we need to do is dip the bowl into the liquid and allow most of the honey to dissolve as this solution comes to the boil we can then add our dry malt extract it's going to go bit clumpy all we need to do is bring the solution to the boil and all the malt extract will dissolve nicely and once boiled and dissolved we can transfer the solution to our clean and sanitised brew bin you want a brew bin which is as close as possible to the final volume of beer that you're making the more dead space you've got in the top the more likely you are to have an infected batch so here I'm using a 10 litre brew bin on the side of this brew bin I've made a mark previously to show where the seven litre level is you may have a brew bin which is already calibrated so no problem so all I do now is top-up to that volume with cold water and hopefully that cold water will bring the temperature of this ginger beer down sufficiently to allow me to add the yeast generally speaking still a bit high and just needs to be left as it is or you could stick it in a bath with ice in it you know surrounding it just like an ice bath to bring the temperature down or if you make all grain beer and you've already got an immersion chiller which is essentially a coil of copper piping which will immerse into the hot liquid you can run cold water through it and that will very quickly bring the temperature down, however a little bit of patience never did anybody any harm now that it's all cooled down to around 25 degrees C we can add our ale yeast we just open the sachet and sprinkle on top of the beer the next step is very key and that is to give the beer a very vigorous stirring for a few minutes, this will aerate the beer and give the yeast the best start it can have the better start it gets, the faster it colonises the beer and once the beer is colonised with your yeast which is the microbe you want in there it is far less likely for any other microbes to come along and infect your beer so, once that's done we replace the lid on our brew bin and move the whole thing to an area with a nice steady ambient temperature leave it there for a week or so and then we can have a look at it a couple of weeks have gone by now all yeast activity has abated the big frothy head that was on the top of this fermenting beer has died down now measuring the specific gravity here with a hydrometer we can see this down to 1.010 which is about what we want before bottling it to further reduce any complications particularly from any infections getting in I'm priming the bottles with Cooper's carbonation drops I'm using a brand new pack so that's going to be sterile as I open it and it's nice and easy because just one Cooper's drop goes into each of these bottles the siphon tubing I'm using here is quite narrow bore what I'm doing here is attaching - with a sterile elastic band a small square of cheesecloth which has also been sanitised this is because last time did the ginger-beer small clumps of the bashed-up root ginger got into the siphon tubing and blocked it so this will stop the happening and make for nice and easy siphoning into the bottles we start the siphoning off by drawing the ginger beer through the siphon tubing, down towards the tap when it gets there we can turn the tap off and then we're ready to put the first bottle underneath, open up and away we go we want it to be fairly gentle pouring the ginger beer down the side of the bottle rather than splashing it to the bottom and when it's all full, close the tap off reach for the next bottle and away we go repeating bottle after bottle until it's done and then we can seal each one up with a cap move it to a warm place and leave it there for a couple of weeks before sampling certainly looks the part now the taste test nice gingery nose hey that's not bad at all certainly not too gingery I think we've probably got it pretty much about right I don't want something that's so hot and fiery that I'm not going to enjoy a full glass of it and that's just got a nice warmth after it from the ginger compared to the the bottle that I bottle conditioned on my first ginger beer which went disastrously wrong with no carbonation at all I think it was actually down to the bottle using the the plastic Cooper's beer bottles has certainly captured the fizz in there that's very nicely carbonated, bubbling away there nicely it's a much drier beer the honey that I put in there I don't know if you can particularly detect it honey I believe is very fermentable so it's quite a dry beer that's fully fermented out and if you recall I used a light malt extract rather than the medium or a darker malt extract so it would be nice to have a bit more of the richness from the the medium and dark malt extracts but that's just my personal taste standing on its own that is a very nice ginger beer and a very polished product this time have put no finings in there at all there's no gelatin this is naturally clear, I just allowed it to ferment out I'm very pleased with that Cheers