This is variation on my citra honey and ginger recipe again with the hop selection dictated mainly by what I had left over from previous brews. I've upped the overall hoppage a bit this time round but the quantity of ginger was toned down to aim for a more subtle hint rather than the quite full ginger beer taste of the original.
The honey, crystal malt and "first wort" hops were steeped in 4 pints water at 65 degrees for 40 minutes.
For the boil I started with 1kg extract in 16 pints water until final 15 minutes when the rest of the extract, the chopped ginger and strained honey mixture.
I cooled the wort in the bath to 35 degrees then put it in fermenter and topped up to the full volume running the added water through the hops in the kettle to rinse out a bit more hop flavour.
"Where's the rhubarb?" You might be wondering. I split the 5 gallon batch at secondary fermentation and tried various combinations as follows:
1 gallon 30g stewed rhubarb
1 gallon 20g stewed rhubarb
1 gallon 10g stewed rhubarb + 10g Kohatu hops
2 gallons 30g Kohatu hops
Left in secondary for a week before bottling. I'll update this description to let you know how it turns out.
UPDATE: So first results are mostly positive. The best batch is definitely the 10+10 which is very drinkable and seems to be nicely balanced with enough rhubarb to give an interesting slightly sour but pleasant flavour. I'm very pleased with this one. The 20 and 30g rhubarb batches are good too but the 30g especially is very dry. The rhubarb does seem to add a dryness along with the sourness you'd expect.
I wouldn't do the 30g Kohatu dry hopped again - the hop flavour was too much and a bit grassy.