We often like to have a beer alternative on tap and we recently tried KegLand's Blunderberg Ginger Beer kit. It's essentially a glorified cordial, requiring some flavour "shot" concentrates to be mixed with water, sugar and another additive to prevent it from fermenting.
You can mix it up as a "hard" alcoholic version or as a soft drink (alcohol free). The alcoholic version can be mixed with some of KegLand's Vinka branded cocktail bases, or with another spirit of your choosing (eg. Vodka). We opted for the alcohol free option this time.
The kit can be made up to 19L (full keg) or 9.5L (half keg) volumes - we went for the half keg for our first batch to see what it was like.
The full list of what is required for the 9.5L soft drink is;
- 2 x 50mL Ginger Beer Flavour Shot sachets
- 1 x FermStop sachet
- 715g white sugar
- Water
- 4 x 50mL Ginger Beer Flavour Shot sachets
- 2 x FermStop sachets
- 1.43kg white sugar
- Water
Mixing it all together is pretty straight forward as you would imagine. KegLand recommend adding 715g of white sugar for the 9.5L version. As you can see in the picture above, we mixed ours in our mini King Keg, which as a 10L capacity, so a tiny bit of headspace left over.
You could dissolve the sugar more easily in hot/warm water first, but we didn't bother - we just added 9.5L of filtered tap water from our fridge. Next, add the two (2) x 50mL Ginger Beer Flavour Shot sachets into the keg.
Lastly, add the single FermStop sachet, which as the name suggests will prevent any wild yeast from taking over and fermenting your ginger beer.
It's important the FermStop is added last - if you add it before the water and add then add the flavour shots, the acidity from the flavour shots will react with the FermStop, causing it to precipitate out and not be effective.
Give the keg a good shake and then connect it to a CO2 gas source to force carbonate. Since this is a soda/soft drink, it will require a fair bit more carbonation than your typical beer. We ended up carbonating and serving with around 20psi of pressure at 3-4°C which was plenty of fizz for our liking. Since the pressure is much higher, you may need to look at longer beer lines and a flow control disconnect to help increase the line resistance when serving to avoid pouring huge amounts of foam. We used a few metres of spare beer line and a flow control disconnect which worked very well for us. Check out our previous post on serving highly carbonated beverages for more details.
If you've mixed with cold water, the sugar will take a bit of time to completely dissolve, but it will get there eventually, so it may not reach peak sweetness right away.
So how does it taste? In a word, awesome.
It's actually hard to believe just how great this tastes, especially when you compare it to how much effort is required to "make" it. It has a really strong and prominent ginger flavour - not dissimilar at all to the original Bundaberg Ginger Beer (obviously where the Blunderberg name was derived from). You'd be hard pressed to make a better tasting ginger beer from scratch using real ginger.
The recommended amount of sugar is also spot on in our opinion. We were going to add slightly less at first, as 715g of sugar is a lot - but we're glad we went with it, and when we make it again we'll be sticking with this amount.
We also didn't bother with any adjustments to our water - ie. pH adjustments with acid or adding other minerals to boost calcium, sulphate or chloride. Basic filtered tap water (to remove chlorine) worked great.
Over the Christmas break we had quite a few family and friends try it out and all were very impressed at how great it tasted. So if you're thinking about giving it a try, we'd highly recommend it - they're great value for money and so quick and easy to make up.
Check out the video below with Kee from KegLand who goes over these kits in more detail
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