Ginger Beer

When I first thought about posting on our ginger beer making adventure I was going to write a face book note but then I realized that this really is an appropriate post for our Singapore blog.  Why?  Ginger is everywhere here in Singapore and we love it.

I have been reading about and trying to apply to our diet the natural fermented foods from Sally Fallon's book "Nourishing Traditions".  It seems to me that this is much easier to do in my country home in Wisconsin.  I have however been successful at finding the items I need to make my Singapore kitchen a "natural kitchen". 

I decided to give making our ginger beer a try as my whole family really enjoys drinking ginger beer.  It  is like ginger ale but much stronger on the ginger flavor with a little spicy kick to it. 

To start you have to make a "ginger bug".  This is not hard to do after you understand fully what to do.  It takes 7 days to make the bug and you make it in a quart size canning jar or larger. 

Here is the recipe I used to make the ginger beer for our family:
Day 1 :
Place 1 1/2 cups filtered water into a glass jar
wash and finely chop some "old" ginger root, old ginger root is stronger than young ginger root,
place 2 tsp of the finely chopped ginger root peel and all into the jar
add 2 tsp of sugar to the jar
stir and cover with a cheese cloth

Day 2-7
add two tsp. sugar and two tsp. of the chopped ginger (peel and all) to the jar EACH day. Stir and cover.  Small bubbles should start appearing somewhere around day 4 and must be present by day 7 or you have to dump it and start over.  This is the fermentation you are looking for to keep the ginger beer from spoiling and it will give it a natural carbonation.

Day 8
Boil 10 cups water to this add 3 cups natural cane sugar (if you can not find it use regular sugar)
Add the rest of your ginger root cut into large pieces to the pot and let simmer for a good 15-20 minutes.  Remove the ginger and let the liquid cool.

Into a very large bowl pour 20 cups of filtered water and add the juice of 4 lemons ( this must be fresh lemon juice not bottled)  some pulp will be in there and that is ok.

When the boiled sugar liquid is room temperature add it to the bowl of lemon water. 

To this add the liquid from your ginger jar that you have been feeding all week.  I used a fine mesh strainer to dump mine through and then took a spoon to squeeze all of the liquid out of the ginger.  Discard the ginger in the strainer.

Cover this bowl very tightly with foil and set where it will not be disturbed.

This is the bowl we used to rest the ginger beer, just cover with foil and leave alone.

Day 9-14
Do nothing, do not disturb your bowl of ginger beer, leave it alone, do not uncover it or bump it.  When you uncover it on day 14 it will have a sweet yeast smell to it.

Day 15
Bottling day.  You will need about 7 one liter bottles or 8 quart bottles you want the ones with the flip tops and they must be glass, see above, we got our bottles at IKEA here in Singapore, they were $3.00 each.
You will need a cup to transfer the beer into the bottles and a funnel.

Transfer the beer into the bottles and leave some head space to allow the bottle to build up some pressure with out exploding.

With in a few hours of bottling you will have lots of tiny bubbles in your bottles, this is good as you want it to ferment and carbonate.

Day 14-28

After bottling the ginger beer place it in a place where it can be left alone for 14 days, the ginger beer needs to continue to work and carbonate. 

We put ours into a big plastic bin so that if any of the bottles "exploded" we would have an easier time cleaning up the mess.  From my reading I do not think this will be a problem, but just in case it does pop open a bottle it is good to have a plan.

Day 28
You can now enjoy your ginger beer, it is good to put the bottle in the refrigerator for a day before opening and I have read that you may want to open it over a sink just in case it foams up.

We bottled our ginger beer today and we leave for Beijing tomorrow so we are really  praying that there are no explosions while we are gone.

We look forward to trying the ginger beer in two weeks.  If you decide to make some let me know how it turns out.