Having "inherited" my father's Mr. Beer Homebrew Kit, I decided to spice things up a bit. With ginger. It wasn't enough for me that merely trying to brew the remaining recipe included in the kit (Dad already did the Stout, leaving me with the 'West Coast Pale Ale), I wanted to try something cool. Adding extra ingredients, increasing the complexity a bit. With the kits, it tends to be a bit 'Add water, add heat, put in fermenter, cool, add yeast, wait patiently, bottle, wait patiently again, drink.' Which, for the most part, is AWESOME.
My problem is that I *started out* reading Charlie Papazian's books, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing and The Homebrewer's Companion. So I started out with all-malt brewing, and using extra crazy ingredients, and extreme recipes that use the kit beers as at best a distant jumping-off point, and more usually, an almost unrelated discipline altogether.
What I like about the Mr. Beer kit is that the recipe book is very simple, but it includes recommended variations. Including one that adds ginger and brown sugar to an otherwise simple, safe Pale Ale. (To be honest, I have no real idea what a West Coast Pale Ale implies. I assume its tamer than the typical craft-brew Imperial IPA or Double IPA, or any of the other hop-tastical variations, but I don't really know that for sure.) So when you see something that adds such "non-stereotypically beery" ingredients to the mix, cool! (That said, there seem to be plenty of recipes calling for ginger, and many calling for far odder things, so clearly I'm still in the kiddy pool over here!)
I was supposed to use only 1/2 of the included Booster Pack, which is the main adjunct sugars, since the brown sugar is supposed to replace some of it. However, in the years since the kit's box was first opened, the air-tight seal on the Booster pack appears to have failed, leaving me with a solid chunk of dextrose sugar, plus whatever other fermentable and non-fermentable ingredients might be mixed in there. So, I added the whole thing. Worst case scenario, I should just have a somewhat stronger beer (a la, batch #1, Kreidler's New Peculiar - see the earlier posts).
What does concern me is the yeast. While it didn't have an expiration date, it was just as old as the malt/hop can, which DID have a date of something like September 2008. Yup. 18 months. Looked and smelled fine, though, so I decided to go ahead with the experiment. I just have no idea if the yeast is gonna do its eating/peeing/farting thing (ie, converting sugar to alcohol and carbonation). Worst case scenario, I can always dose the fermenter with live yeast without too much worry. We shall see...
