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Ginger

Kegged on September 28, 2011.

During a trip to Port Townsend, WA I tried a ginger cider from Eaglemount Wine and Cider. It had a very strong ginger flavor that worked pretty well, so I decided to make my own version. I used five gallons of Kirkland Signature Organic Apple Juice, a 24 ounce bag of Sugar In The Raw cane turbinado sugar, one pound of ginger, and Wyeast Pacman (1764) yeast. The image below shows the ingredients.

I peeled and grated/blended the ginger and then placed it in a steeping bag. I poured a small amount of apple juice into a pot and added the ginger and sugar. I heated the juice to 165 degrees Fahrenheit for around 10 minutes to kill anything on the ginger and to dissolve the sugar. I added the solution with the steeping bag to a plastic fermenting bucket. I then added the rest of the apple juice and the yeast. I decided to aim for an alcohol content of 6.5%, so I took regular specific gravity measurements. The graph below shows this data.

Below is an image of the final product.

The original gravity was 1.065. The ginger filled steeping bag was removed from the fermenting bucket after six days. The cider was transferred to a secondary container after nine days; I added four or five teaspoons of potassium sorbate to keep the yeast from reproducing. The carboy then spent 63 days in the fridge, for a total time of 72 days (this cider stayed in the fridge for so long because I was out of the state for several weeks starting around the time I had planned to put it in the kegs). The final gravity was 1.015, which resulted in an alcohol content of 6.5%.

My friends liked this cider a lot. It had a strong ginger flavor and was pretty spicy. From the samples I took during fermentation it seems that the majority of the ginger flavor was added during the heating process, and the spicy taste became stronger the longer the ginger was left in the fermenting bucket. If I remake this cider I might try using the same amount of ginger but remove the steeping bag before pouring the solution into the fermenting bucket.

© 2012 Erik Roby
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