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I have recently started to get my feet wet by making some ginger beers using a ginger bug to start the fermentation. I would like to know the alcohol content of my final product, but as the ginger bug has both bacteria and yeast eating the sugars I can not figure out how I would measure the final alcohol content!

3 questions:

  1. Is there a way to figure out how much sugar has been consumed by either the yeast or bacteria, so I can then just use a hydrometer as suggested most places I search?
  2. Can I measure the alcohol content by some other indicator besides sugar content?
  3. What other tools might be used besides a refractometer or a hydrometer?
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  • For dry wines, you can use a Vinometer, but I don't know if that will work for your ginger.
    – Robert
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 0:10
  • Thanks, but I would very rarely be fermenting out all the sugar as that would not taste nice, so if I understand this tool correctly then it will not work for me.
    – Jeppe
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 10:01

1 Answer 1

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If you have a beginning gravity and an end gravity, it's pretty easy to figure an approximate ABV for your beverage.

The only way to definitively tell how much alcohol is in a solution is to run it through a Ebulliometer, which is essentially a tiny alcohol still. Sorry, that's the only real ways to do it!

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  • As your link suggests then an Ebulliometer is not meant for hobby level brewing, it is very expensive. It there something like a hobby level version of this? I am thinking as long as I am within 0.5 ABV of the actual alcohol content it will be good enough for me
    – Jeppe
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 10:05
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    No. There is nothing. Those are your choices. You can send it to a lab for them to tell you how much alcohol and it's fairly cheap.
    – farmersteve
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 13:21

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