Ginger Honey Cider

[tammykva]

I am new to this home brewing and can use some advice. Since I am so new I am using the brew demon set and have had some good results. I would like to add some stuff to my next brew of cider and do a honey ginger hard apple cider. Can someone give me advice on how to do this. How much cider and ginger to add and how to add it.
Thanks in advance

tammy

[mashani]

Depends... on a lot of things... based on my experience.

What are you looking to get? Something slightly sweet with strong ginger? Something slightly sweet with mild ginger? Something dry and tart with ginger?

Things to consider are that spices get strong very quickly in beer and cider and mead. The equivalent of 25g of ginger was *very potent* in a 2.5 gallon batch of Saison I made. It took a good bit of aging for it to mellow to the levels I had intended it to be

Thing about honey is that it will completely ferment out. So it doesn't add any sweetness, instead it makes the beverage seem drier and more alcoholic, and the flavor it adds can come across as "woody" even, unless you back sweeten the beverage somehow or use a lot more honey then your going to use in a cider. It can be beneficial to add it later in the fermentation to keep some of the aroma, but it still doesn't change the flavor, or how much it ferments out.

So if you want some sweetness to bring back out the honey like flavors, then you would need to add some lactose to the mix. Lactose is not fermentable by most yeast.

That might just have made your head hurt, but if you can be more specific about what your trying to achieve, maybe we can help more.

[Inkleg]

@mashani, you mean you can help more. I learn something from you every time you answer someones post. You sir are a wiki of brewing knowledge.

The only advise I can give is to keep notes on all your brews. What ever works best for you. I have a 3 ring binder that I will put my printed recipe into. (I use BeerSmith)
I'll use it as a check sheet as ingredients go in at their appointed times or for notes if they don't make it in when they should. I'll make other notes as well, brew date, bottle date, yeast pitched and at what temperature, fermentation temperature, knocked a fly into the chilled wort, dropped colander with grain bag into brew kettle splashing hot sticky wort everywhere. Just normal brew day things. Because I know I won't remember any of that in 6-8 weeks when I'm trying it for the first time.

[tammykva]

Thanks for the replies, very helpful. thanks again. so I guess I will opt out on the honey. I like a strong ginger flavor so I will try a little in my next batch and go from there. Very good idea about the binder I am totally gonna do that.

Thanks
Tammy

[Taz11]

Not sure if you are still trying this Tammy, but we have had very good luck by using honey during the bottling phase ( as the bottling sugar ) for our cider batches. We add honey directly to the bottling bucket which will preserve most of the flavor and sweetness from the honey in the cider, as well as providing some carb to your batch.

We have done this a few times with apple cider batches that we bottled.

Most bottling priming calculators have honey as an option ( here is one on screwy brewers page: http://www.thescrewybrewer.com/p/brewin ... s.html#bpc ) and we just used it.

report back and let us know how it goes!