June 15th, 2005
How To Make Ginger Beer
I fancied a nice cool drink the other night, but I’m fed up with cola, lemonade and juices.
I prefer a “drier” soft drink, and one that doesn’t make you want to scrub your teeth
immediately after drinking. So I decided to make myself some ginger beer.
“Hang on, why didn’t you just buy some ginger beer?” I imagine you asking me. Well, most commercially produced ginger beer is far too sweet and not gingery enough for my taste, that is why. And I was bored.
So, here’s what I used to make a delicious ginger beverage:
- 2 litre bottle of still mineral water
- large chunk of root ginger (you need 1½ to 2 tablespoons of grated ginger)
- 1 lemon
- 1 cup of sugar
- ¼ teaspoon of dried yeast
You’ll also need a grater to grate the ginger, and a plastic funnel. I didn’t have a funnel, but you really need one. Trust me on this.
“Hey idiot, why did you buy a bottle of water instead of using tap water?” Well, you need a two litre bottle to make the ginger beer in, and London tap water isn’t the nicest in the world. So I spared no expense and spent 18p on a bottle of Sainsbury’s Still Table Water and killed two birds with one stone. If you already have a clean two litre bottle, and your tap water is ok, then feel free to use that. Or try a nice expensive mineral water if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.
Now that’s out of the way, here’s what I did next:
1) Lay all your ingredients out to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.
2) Realise you’ve forgotten the yeast, so get that too.
3) Decant the water into a suitable temporary container (skip this step if you are using tap water)
4) Using a plastic funnel, pour the sugar into the bottle. (if you don’t have a funnel fashion one out of paper like me)
5) Add the dried yeast to the bottle.
6) Now, grate the ginger until you have between 1½ and 2 tablespoon’s worth. I used 2 tablespoons because I really like ginger, but feel free to vary this according to your tastes. Also, you may wish to cut the skin off before grating. I’m lazy so I left it all on.
7) Next, extract the juice from one lemon.
8 ) Mix the grated ginger and lemon juice together in a cup or other suitable piece of crockery.
9) Next you need to add the ginger/lemon mixture to the bottle. This is where a plastic funnel comes in really handy. for some reason paper funnels don’t work so well once wet.
10) Now, you need to add the water to the bottle. Fill it up until it is about ¾ full, then put the cap on and shake the bottle until all the sugar is dissolved.
11) You then need to top the bottle up until there is approximately a one inch gap at the top. This gap is to prevent explosions once the yeast gets to work.
12) Put the cap on the bottle as tightly as you can, then place the bottle somewhere warm. I put mine in my airing cupboard. You’ll need to leave it for 24-48hours to let the yeast go to work. Once the bottle is very hard, and can’t be squeezed, the ginger beer is done. It took 24 hours for my batch to be ready.
13) Place the bottle in the fridge overnight. This halts the yeast and stops the bottle exploding. You really don’t want to leave that bottle in a warm place for any longer than 48 hours.
14) Once the ginger beer is chilled, pour it into a glass and enjoy. I sieve mine when pouring so I don’t have any lumps of ginger in the drink.
And there you have it. 2 litres of delicious ginger beer for around 90p and very little effort.
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This worked quite well the first time. I used a little bit more ginger though ;-). Is there a way to a) reduce the yeast-taste a bit and b) do something agains all the sparkles getting out when opening the bottle. It seems that the grated ginger promotes this effect, so once I opened the bottle there was a lot of gas coming out and after I filled the contents through a sieve in a new bottle (or a glass for drinking) it was tasting a bit dull, since a lot of the gas went out already.
Could it also work to first let the ginger, sugar and lemon sit in the water for a day or two and then add the yeast after removing the grated ginger? Or will that give a different taste?
Putting the Ginger in first works quite well!
I put about 3 TSp of freshly grated Ginger in 2l water plus a small cup of sugar and 1/2 lemon worth of juice. I squeezed the grated ginger a bit while putting it in the bottle and I think this was good because some juice came out (Maybe one could even exctract juice from ginger and put this in the water instead of the grated ginger). Then I just waited a day, filled the gingery sugarwater though a sieve in another bottle, added just a little bit of bread yeast, closed the bottle and put it in a room with floor heating for a day. Some foam appeared on the surface and told me that the yeast worked well. The bottle was quite hard from the pressure buildup. Then I did not open it but put it right into the fridge for 2h. Now I could easily open it without spilling anything and I had good, sparkeling ginger beer.
It took two days however, but it had more gas than the one-day version (which lost most of that while sieving it) and needed less sugar than the version in which I tried to let the one-day version ferment another day after sieving.
Thanks for the recipe, I now need to give less money to the Coca-Cola-Company and have even better soft drinks! :-)
[…] per the instructions here). If you had a look through, you’ll notice that it takes a number of days to finish it and […]
to get rid of the lumps of ginger you can add dried ground ginger
over here in nz we can by packs of the stuff so its heaps easier, keeps
for ages without going off and almost dissolves into the gingerbeer
just an idea worth sharing!!
I would love to try this recipe,
But would like to know why you said that we should use bakers yeast, is this because it’s cheaper/easier to buy … Or is it because it tastes better?
I would like to know which yeast makes the best ginger beer, and I am hoping you can tell me.
Thank you,
Calem Young
ok thanks,
i will try making it with bakers yeast first and then i’ll
compare it to one i’ll make with brewer’s yeast,
i’ll writeback to you with the result.
thanks again,
Calem Young =)
I really like the simplicity of this recipe and can’t wait to try it when I get a chance. Though, I was wondering if you had any ideas of how to boost the alcohol content. I was thinking if I used a bit more sugar and yeast and then left extra room at the top of the bottle so it could ferment longer that might do the trick. However, I’ve never tried anything like this before and wondered if you have ever experimented w/ this aspect of the recipe or had any ideas. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Isaac
[…] your own Here is my favorite recipie - but you’ll have to be careful not to get Ginger in your D&S… Here is another… looks more […]
My mother used to make this recipe with fresh yeast. She put the mixture in a wide crock and floated the yeast on a slice of bread. When it was bottled, we could hear the bottles exploding in the pantry!
I used to make, years ago, a very similar version of Ginger Beer. Thank you for reminding me of the quantities. I’m going to buy an 8 litre jerry of water (I’m in spain, they are cheap here) brew in that, using a kettleful hot to a/. give me room and b/ warm up the brew, and then syphon off into clean pop bottles, leaving most of the solids behind. Then you need to wait until the bottles are hard before drinking. In the old days, before plastic pop bottles, I had a glass ginger beer bomb in my larder too!
Thanks again!
[…] recipe is below, but I’m linking back to the original post too because they deserve the credit - and are an ORG supporter […]
Here is a recipe i found on the web
The starter recipe for Ginger Beer is as follows:
The ginger beer plant (GBP)
1/4 tsp. Yeast (ordinary dry baker’s yeast from the supermarket).
2 tsps. Sugar.
2 tsps. Ground ginger.
3/4pt. lukewarm water.
Feeding:
Daily for seven days.
1.tsp. sugar.
1 tsp. ginger.
Method:
Use a 2lb. jam jar or large coffee jar, put all the starter ingredients into it and put the lid on then place some where warm and dark.
Feed daily for seven days.
On the eigth day filter the contents of the jars through 2 layers of musslin and a coffee filter.
Making the beer.
To make the beer.
2pts. boiling water.
5 pts. Cold water.
1.5 lbs. Sugar depending on your taste.
juice of 2 lemons and or limes.
disolved the sugar in the boiling water.
Add the fruit juice, and then add the five pints of cold water.
Now add the liquid from the jar.
Bottle in 2ltr fizzy drink bottle, leave at room temprature for 24hrs or until bottle goes hard.
Next put in fridge, to stop the yeast working, very important unless you like moping floors and carpets.
Now divide your GBP into two parts give away one part to a friend and start feeding your plant again
I like the simplicity of this approach. I just tried a similar recipe but the yeast taste was quite strong and too much for my son. Does the yeast just make it fizzy or does it have some other vital function and so could one use some sparkling water. Or would that be heresy?
To avoid the lumps. After grating the ginger you can put it in a jay cloth (the blue cleaning ones) and strain the juice out. This saves adding the fiber to the mix. I saw a chef do this on TV when he wanted ginger juice. I can confirm it works well.
Washing it would probably be a good idea. The batch I have don’t smell of anything but you never know what is lurking. Muslin or cheese cloth would be better if you can get it.
In answer to Dave’s question I have made non alcoholic cordial using the straining method. Just boil the sugar in water then add ginger juice and the juice of a lemon or lime (use the least water you can to get the sugar to desolve in). Chill then pour some in a glass and add fizzy water.
I had a South American boyfriend who made ginger beer buy putting ginger, water, rice and sugar in an old wine bottle for a couple days, I assume the rice has yeast culture on it but it didn’t taste yeasty when you drank it. I’m not sure of the quantities or anything. anyone else had experience with this? or have any comments?
[…] vurt.co.uk » How To Make Ginger Beer (tags: recipe drinks howto food) […]
Perhaps the wine bottle had some traces of yeast in it left over from the wine.
Hi there! Ever since I got back from Australia last summer did I want to brew my own ginger beer. Which, in Switzerland simply isn’t available (unless you allow Canada Dry in this category, but I wouldn’t go that far). So I tried aurora’s 2-step version of this recipe, and it turned out quite nicely indeed.
But I still have two questions. First: is there a way to remove the plant (as I believe the little colony of yeast is called) that decants at the bottom of the bottle? It gets problematic when pouring the last helpings… Yet another filter operation?
Then, almost all ginger beer “old times” recipes include cream of tartar (or potassium bitartrate). Does someone knows what this substance is for? It doesn’t appear to be necessary, since gile’s recipe already yields pretty good results, but I’m curious. And if it’s useful, can it be replaced by another acid, like citric acid which is more readily available in non anglo-saxon countries, apparently?
Thanks for the recipe!
hi! I have tryed bakers yeast and brewers yeast
and I think that bakers yeast was more successful.
cheers.
calem26.
I have never made Ginger Beer (but after reading this site I think I will.) But I do brew my own all grain beers.
With Grain Beer you let it sit for at least 2 weeks for the fermentation to finish. Adding more or less sugar would give you more or less Alcohol By Volume.
The yeast “taste” people have mentioned is strong for 2 reasons.
First, the yeast taste is stronger while its still active…this is why beer makers and wine makers let their product sit, sometimes for years (depending on the type of yeast) in order to mellow out the taste.
Second, bread yeast has a very strong yeast flavor and smells…well…like bread yeast. An Ale yeast like whitelabs british ale yeast would probably work quite well and have a better finishing taste (http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/strains_wlp005.html). You can find this yeast a most homebrew stores.
For finding out how much alcohol is in the Ginger beer you would want a hydrometer…which measures the sugar to water ratio in your ginger beer. You would need to take a reading at the start of the batch and again in two weeks. Comparing the numbers will tell you how much sugar the yeast ate and that gives you a pretty good idea for how much alcohol is in the beer. The longer the yeast works the more sugar gets eaten which means the beer will get less sweet over time. You can counter this by “feeding” sugar to the solution during the two week process.
Bread yeast is used to make meads and tends to end with a very high alcohol content. Much higher then beer. An Ale yeast would peter out around 5% or 6% ABV…but I think bread yeast will finish out at like 10% to 15% ABV.
Anyway…Cant wait to try this.
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Hiya, Just a quick note of thanks for the Ginger Beer recipe. I’ve wanting to make my own since I was a wee lad. Tried the recipe last night and hey presto, 24hrs later I have ginger beer!! Out of interest, does it have any alcoholic content??
TrickyTrev on September 20th, 2007 1:09 pm