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Making Ginger Beer is awesome and easy – although you require a little patience; its biggest downside is it will take at least 2-4 weeks before it’s ready and demands your attention at the start of the process.  The upside is the depth of flavor, natural carbonation that is something magical to have created.

Our recipe is based on the writing of Sandor Kraut though the quantities of ingredients and technique are pretty similar across the Internet as I suspect they have been for hundreds of years.

There are two parts to the process – the initial small fermentation (called the ‘bug’) which gets things really kicking (almost like a starter for sour dough), and then a secondary fermentation with additional ingredients.

Ingredients

1. Water
2. Ginger (a large piece about 8 inches long)
3. 1.5 cups of sugar
4. 2 lemons (it just isn’t the same without them)

Instructions

1. To start the bug, place 1 cup of room temperature water in a jar or bowl (I use a mason jar).  If your tap water is chlorinated, allow it to sit open to the air for an hour before proceeding (this will help eliminate the chlorine and will help the fermenting).
2. Add 2 teaspoons of sugar and 2 teaspoons of finely chopped ginger.  Stir well.
3. Cover loosely with cheesecloth; I use a single layer as natural yeasts will enter the jar but flies will not.  I hold it in place by screwing a band around it (just not using the lid).
4. Store in a warm, dry place.
5. Add ginger and sugar (the same amounts) every day, stirring after.  Repeat until your contents become fizzy (you’ll be able to hear it).  This should take a couple of days and up to a week.  Our apartment has a bit of the initial chill of winter in it so it takes its sweet time.
6. Boil 2 liters of water with six inches of chopped ginger root (for a strong flavor, you can use less if you’d like) and 1.5 cups of sugar.
7. Allow the mixture to cool completely and strain the contents to remove the solids.
8. Add the juice of two lemons, and this syrup to your ginger bug.
9. Strain the mixture to remove solids.
10. Add water (again a good practice is to let the chlorinated water sit for a bit) to increase the contents to 4 liters (roughly a gallon)
11. Bottle in clean bottles – you can get them from brew-your-own beer stores, reuse Grolsch pop-top bottles or use beer bottles if you have a capper.  We’ll share how to sterilize/clean later this week (it’s a post unto itself).  Avoid regular plastic pop bottles – the pressure of fermentation is intense enough to stretch and eventually explode them.
12. Store until the bottle is hard to squeeze (in the case of plastic).  It should take 2-3 weeks.
13. Refrigerate before opening and know that this can be a little more prone to making a mess when opening so be near a sink, with a glass!

It’s really fantastic…

If you make Ginger Beer, do you do anything differently?