This is your fault Gordy!

A few posts back I got excited about my bubbly fermenting kimchi and one of my 'regular readers' foolishly asked if it was possible to make kimchi beer. Well, only one way to find out I guess :)

After a bit of digging around on the internet I figured that for various scientific reasons* it would be hard to make a brew that would stronger than about 2-3% by volume. Not so bad if you're making a tasty mildly fermented beverage like kefir but I was after something with a little more kick. So I decided to follow the techniques I used to use when brewing 'hedgerow' beers & wines back in the UK.

First you need to develop the flavours of your ingredients. This has already been done in the case of the kimchi, so I just ladled half the jar into a plastic tub and added some sugary water.

 Then I added some beer yeast, which quickly took hold and started to go a bit nuts

I added about 2 litres of water into the tub and a kilo of sugar and let it sit menacingly on the kitchen windowsill for a week or so, where it gurgled ominously and scared the neighbours. No pictures of this, but you get the idea.

After the initial foaming of the fermentation (or to get technical, the krausen) had died down I filtered out the vegetable matter by sieving the solution into a clean demijohn

Then topped up with water (filtered of course - don't want to introduce any off flavours) and added an airlock

It's still very sweet so this needs to bubble away for a few more weeks - it doesn't look very enthusiastic at the minute. I may need to add some more  yeast to help it along and ferment it up to the 8% or so it has the potential to reach, but we'll see how we go.

Edit - It seemed to recover well overnight, and in fact had made a bid for freedom via the airlock

Looks tasty doesn't it? I'll be sure to get a photo of Gordy sculling a glass or two.....

*and now for the science bit, at least as I understand it. Fermentation can work in a few different ways. If you've been paying attention over the last few years you'll know that yeast works by nibbling away at sugars stored in grains, fruits or in some cases vegetables and converting them to alcohol, farting out carbon dioxide as a by product. The active ingredient used in cheese, yoghurt, pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut etc is lactobacillus and this works in a slightly different way. It converts sugars to lactic acid, which lowers the acidity or Ph of the solution. This in turn acts as a preservative and a way of storing food for extended periods of time without refrigeration as well as adding a tasty tang to whatever is being fermented.

The problem is that there are many different types of lactobacillus and only a few produce alcohol. So to be sure to get a drink that will be strong enough to allow someone to stomach the potential taste, I needed to help it along with beer yeast. I'm not sure how the beer yeast will cope with the increased acidity, although I'm pretty sure it will be better than how everyone else will cope with the kimchi beer...