I have hundreds of recipes, but what I would love to find is a gardenweb forum type of bulletin board for people who make alcoholic drinks (not only wine!) I want to ask lots of questions about things like how to measure alcohol content, just how much sugar you really need, and so on. I'm hoping to adapt a recipe so I can make an alcoholic version of ginger beer which is also low sugar -- perhaps sweetened to a great extent with stevia! Is this an impossible dream? Anyone know of any such forum?

Sounds like you want to make something like mead... Check out the following link. You can also just type mead into your search engine. Here is a link that might be useful: mead recipes

OMM Thanks so much for taking the time to post this recipe. It sounds really refreshing. The plastic bottles are an excellent idea. I'm going to try a batch as soon as I can get to the brew shop and get some beer yeast.

I had hoped that somewhere online I could find an old-fashioned ginger beer recipe that was similar to the recipe that I have brewed these last few years, the one that I just posted to the forum here. Copy and pasting is soooo much easier than pecking but, darned it, I couldn't find a single recipe like mine, or even one that wasn't overly complicated with specialty ingredients. What I did find on my search, though, was a recipe for an Australian ginger beer that was buried in the Mother Earth News archives. It sounds like a real winner for people who are up to the task, and perfect for someone, such as myself, that enjoys a little bit of kitchen alchemy. After pecking out my old-fashioned ginger beer recipe it is such a pleasure to simply do this: http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1981_March_April/Ginger_Beer Per their recipe; in case you don't already know, unsulfared sultanas are available at pretty much any health food store that offers items in bulk. Grocery store sultanas are almost always sulfared to impede the growth of yeast. Also, I would use fresh grated ginger but, if you opt for powdered then that would be found fresher and cheaper at a good health food store, too. If anybody tries this recipe out before I do then please let me know how it goes for you. I hope you all have a great new years! OzarkMtMan