Anyway

My Mum used to make ginger beer on the farm. We would seal it in the glass bottles with bottle caps that you tapped on with a ham­mer, try­ing hard not to break the glass. A bottle or two would occa­sion­ally explode dur­ing the fer­ment­a­tion pro­cess, which was excit­ing, and messy.

I’ve taken to mak­ing it. Home-made ginger beer is a refresh­ing, fizzy drink, much less sweet than com­mer­cial soft drinks, with a pleas­ing zing. There is a small amount of alco­hol in it due to the yeast-mak­ing-bubbles fer­ment­a­tion step, but it’s min­im­al. The pro­cess of mak­ing it is fun, teaches the kids some­thing about chem­istry, and is much less messy with the advent of PET bottles.

The pro­cess is reas­on­ably simple. You start with a ginger beer plant (actu­ally a fungus yeast and a bac­teri­um; more details here). You feed it ginger and sug­ar every day until it’s ready, then add the liquid to a mix­ture of water, sug­ar, and lem­on juice. Bottle, store for a few days, and enjoy!

There are a num­ber of places on the inter­net you can get a ginger beer plant. I made my own; as a con­sequence it may not be a ‘real’ ginger beer plant, but giv­en the ginger beer it pro­duces is good, I’m not bothered by that fact. There are lots of vari­ations; this is the recipe I follow.

To make the plant, put the fol­low­ing ingredi­ents in a jug or jar.

• 8 organ­ic sul­tanas (golden rais­ins). You need organ­ic (or oth­er unpro­cessed, if you’re lucky enough to be able to get them) to get access to the nat­ur­al yeasts that live on the sul­tana skins. Mod­ern pro­cessed sul­tanas are too clean and don’t have those yeasts on them, so the ginger beer won’t fer­ment properly.
• ¼ cup lem­on juice. Use real lem­ons to get the juice, not some­thing that comes in a bottle. Organ­ic is nice, but not necessary.
• 1 tea­spoon grated lem­on zest. Make sure you wash the lem­on first to get rid of any coat­ing that might inter­fere with the yeast.
• 1 table­spoon sug­ar. I use white sug­ar, but you can use any type.
• 2 tea­spoons ground ginger. You can also grate fresh ginger if you like, but I find that’s too much work. 
• 2 cups water. I usu­ally use ordin­ary water, since our tap water isn’t too heav­ily chlor­in­ated. If you would­n’t drink your tap water, use bottled or filtered (but not distilled).

Stir, and cov­er the jar loosely with a cloth. You want air to get in (for the nat­ur­al yeasts) but not bugs (in sum­mer this is a mag­net in my kit­chen for fruit flies). Keep at nor­mal room tem­per­at­ure. Feed every day with 2 tea­spoons ground ginger and 2 — 4 tea­spoons of sug­ar (I use 4, you may like it slightly sweeter or less sweet). After a couple of days, you should notice some bubbles in the mix, and even a slight smell of fer­ment­a­tion as the nat­ur­al yeasts go to work on the sug­ar and ginger. The plant will be more act­ive in sum­mer, when the kit­chen is warmer.

After a week or three (the peri­od depend­ing on how much time I have in any giv­en week), make the ginger beer. You will need around 12 one-litre PET bottles. If you don’t have those at home, a loc­al beer-brew­ing shop will be happy to sell some to you, com­plete with the caps. Wash in soapy water, and rinse to get the bubbles out. You don’t need to ster­il­ise the bottles, I find the usu­al deter­gents to be adequate.

In a large pot, boil 5 cups of water with 3 cups of sug­ar. Stir to make sure the sug­ar is all dis­solved, then take the pot off the heat. Add the juice of three fresh lem­ons (yes, the pro­hib­i­tion against bottled lem­on juice applies here too). If you have small lem­ons, make that the juice of four lem­ons. Place a clean cloth (an old lin­en tea tow­el, for example) over a sieve or colan­der and pour the ginger beer plant through the cloth into the pot. Squeeze the cloth to get as much liquid out of the plant and into the pot as pos­sible. Add 7 litres of water to the pot (same com­ments on the water as above; I use tap water). Bottle the ginger beer, leav­ing some space at the top of the bottle for expansion.

The con­tents of the cloth are the ginger beer plant itself. Take approx­im­ately half of it, put in a clean jar with two cups of water, and feed. I also put anoth­er couple of sul­tanas in at this stage. This is the basis for the next batch of ginger beer, so feed every day as before. Give the oth­er half of the plant to someone, or add to your com­post bin. The plant gets bet­ter as it ages, so it’s worth­while keep­ing it going rather than start­ing new each time.

After a couple of days, you should see some small bubbles in the bottles, and the bottles should be firmer. This stage may take a couple of days longer in winter than sum­mer. You can drink the ginger beer at this stage, but it tastes bet­ter if you can leave it at least a week.