Making Ginger Beer
Introduction
Once upon a time we could
buy Reed's Extra Ginger
Brew locally. Sometimes,
while traveling, I'd even
run across a new, exotic
ginger beer.
But most of the time there's
nothing but ginger ale, which
isn't even close.
I finally decided to do something
about it and learn to make ginger
beer at home...
The ginger beer we will be making
is a soft drink much like root beer.
When creating a commercial ginger
beer the manufacturer develops
a base drink by adding sugar and
flavoring to water, and then
infuses it with CO2 using special
equipment to give it bubbles.
The process described here uses
fermentation to create the CO2
bubbles. Fermentation imparts
a very small percentage of alcohol,
about what you'd find in a
non-alcoholic beer or less.
If you'd rather not mess with
fermentation be sure to check out
the page of alternative methods.
On the other hand if you are
looking for non-soft drink
recipes then try here.
The recipe is very simple and once
you get the hang of making it you
should feel free to experiment
with other flavor combinations.
Making root beer uses the same
basic recipe with a root beer
extract in place of the ginger
root.
We like our ginger beer with
a strong bite.
Served on ice it's the perfect
refresher after a long day of
toiling in the sun.
Basic Recipe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's the basic recipe.
There's really only two key components involved: blending ingredients to best
suit your taste AND making sure the
yeast is happy.
Ingredients:
1 handful of fresh ginger root: juiced, grated, or sliced fine
about 1/4-1/3 cup of juice, depending on how strong you like it
2 cups of sugar
1 gallon of water
1/2 tablespoon of bread yeast
Optional:
substitute 1/4 cup of the white sugar with brown sugar
(adds bit of flavor and makes a slightly darker ginger beer)
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (extra zing!)
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar (balances PH, for smooth mouth feel)
fresh lemon and/or lime
If you can, use a juicer on the ginger root (we use a Champion Juicer). You'll
end up with 1/4 to 1/3 cup of juice.
Don't drink this stuff straight as it is wickedly potent!
If you don't have a juicer then slice, dice, or puree as
best you can.
The goal is to get the juice out or at least make the
ginger bits small enough that the juice will come out
when boiled.
Fill a gallon jug with fresh water, leaving some head room
(a cup or so).
Like all things the better the water the better the end
product, so it's up to you and your taste buds if you use
spring water or chlorinated city water.
Pour the water from the jug into a big cooking pot and put
on the burner to boil.
Add the ginger and any spices or fruits/juices.
Toss in the sugar and stir well until dissolved.
While you wait for the water to boil you should reconstitute
the yeast.
This means taking a half a cup of warm water (not hot, finger
warm).
I'll often dissolve a teaspoon of sugar in the water, the
yeast is much happier when it wakes up to find something
to eat!
Sprinkle the yeast over the top.
Don't stir, let sit for fifteen minutes.
We use bread yeast since it is readily available and is
good at putting out lots of CO2 gas.
Wine yeasts are engineered to generate less CO2, which means
we'd have to ferment longer for the same amount of bubbles
and we'd probably have more alcohol in the end product.
Since we are interested primarily in bubbles the bread yeast
works perfect.
Meanwhile let the water boil for a few minutes.
If you are using fresh lemons or diced ginger you might want
to boil longer to extract more flavors.
Once done boiling put the pot in a sink full of cold water.
This will help it cool down quickly so you can finish up the
first stage, putting ice cubes in the sink will help too.
Once the temperature is below a hundred degrees fahrenheit (lukewarm) strain
the liquid through a sieve or cheesecloth
back into the gallon jug. Stir up the reconstituted yeast
and add to jug, stir well, and then seal loosely.
To seal the jug you can use a brewing airlock, a balloon stretched over the lip
(wash balloon out first), or some clean cloth draped over.
Mostly you want to keep bugs from getting in while still allowing gas to escape
once the yeast kicks in.
Place jug in a warm location but not in direct sunlight.
Bubble Machine
---------------
After a few hours you should start seeing tiny bubbles in the jug. The timing
will vary, depending on how warm it is and how well the yeast kicks in. If
nothing happens after a day there's a good chance the yeast was bad or
something in the mixture disagreed with it...dump it.
When you see a steady stream of bubbles it is time to bottle the ginger beer.
I use plastic bottles. The main reason is safety. With plastic it's easy to
give the bottle a squeeze and judge how much pressure has built up. With glass
you have no indication. If you want to use glass then I'd recommend searching
for good references on the precautions and safety, it can be dangerous.
These plastic bottles are from a six pack of walmart spring water. I've also
tried the tall, skinny plastic bottles (with ribs) but they don't hold as much
and seem to be made of a more brittle plastic.
Clean the bottles and arrange the lids, funnel, and cheesecloth for pouring.
Ideally if you can pour one bottle right after the other without jostling the
gallon jug you will pour off the least amount of sediment. Grab a friend to
help.
Fill each bottle about an inch from the top and screw on the
plastic lid firmly. Squeeze one of the bottles before putting
on the lid so that almost all of the air is squeezed out, then
cap while it's still squeezed. This deformed bottle will be a "visual" test. By
looking at it you will be able to judge how quickly the pressure is building by
how long it takes to
re-inflate.
Wipe off the bottles and set them in a warm place again. Warm temperatures make
the yeast act faster, so a cool 55 degree fahrenheit room might take twice as
long as an 80 degree room. In a sixty five degree room it takes about twelve to
fifteen hours for the bottles to build up good pressure. To be on the safe side
you might want to put them into a plastic bucket or other type of waterproof
container to catch any leaks. You can also wear safety glasses and leather
gloves when handling them just to be sure.
Keep an eye on your test bottle to see how long before it expands to its normal
shape. Squeeze the bottles from time to time to gauge how tight the plastic is
and thus how much pressure is building. On my first batch I didn't know what to
expect and was nervous the whole time. Now that I have done this a half dozen
times I have a pretty good feel for how long it takes and how tight these
bottles can get.
When you can't take the pressure anymore (hah, hah) put the bottles into the
refrigerator. The cold temperature of the fridge will eventually halt the
fermentation. Remember, it is only halted, not stopped for good.
If you left a bottle out it will most likely start fermentation again and not
stop until it blows up or consumes all of the sugar. Blowing up is most likely.
Depending on your fridge it may also continue to ferment very slowly inside, so
don't leave bottles unattended while you go away on vacation.
Typically we start ginger beer around mid-day and within a few hours we bottle
it, which is late afternoon. The bottles are left out overnight to build
pressure and put in the fridge the next morning.
For your first batch you might want to start early in the morning so you can
finish up and put them in the fridge before going to bed.
New Recipe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is my latest recipe for Ginger beer and it is a winner. There's a ginger
and cayenne bite to it and the other spices add enough subtle flavor to round
things out nicely. Just the thing after a long bike ride home.
Here's the approximate recipe:
fist sized ginger, juiced or sliced up
tablespoon peppercorns
cinnamon stick
teaspoon fennel seeds
teaspoon cardamon seeds
tablespoon cloves
dash of cayenne pepper
two cups sugar
teaspoon cream of tartar (optional)
yeast
1 gallon or so of good water
The recipe preparations are pretty much the same as with the first recipe. You
might want to let the water simmer for a while to extract more flavor from the
spices.
How it works
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just as in making wine or beer, the yeast is multiplying rapidly while
consuming sugar. The byproducts of its sugar consumption is alcohol and CO2.
When making wine you typically ferment for a week, by which time the yeast has
converted all of the sugar to CO2 and alcohol. The CO2 is vented out of the
airlock and the wine is left with ten or twelve percent alcohol. Temperature
effects how fast the yeast acts, along with subtle influences by acid and other
nutrients.
In making ginger beer the goal is to get lots of CO2 in a short period of time,
trapping it in the liquid. We start fermenting in the gallon jug just long
enough for the yeast to get really started. Once we see steady fermentation the
liquid is transferred to bottles and sealed. Now the CO2 has nowhere to go and
is captured in the liquid. The yeast merrily goes on producing, pressure keeps
building, and eventually we decide that it is bubbly enough and put the bottles
in a fridge which stops the fermentation or at least slows it down quite a bit.
The process has also produced some small percentage of alcohol.
It took less than a day from start to finish to make my last batch of Ginger
Beer. I measured the percentage of sugar at the start at 9.5% and after
fermenting it was right around 9%. Using the alcohol scale on the hydrometer it
roughly looks like a 2% change in sugar reflects 1% in alcohol. Given that I
calculate the ginger beer alcohol level at around .25% alcohol. Pretty low.
No matter how much filtering you do while making ginger beer you will see some
sediment collect at the bottom of the bottles. This
is the cast off yeast and finer ginger particles. It's harmless.
You can either drink it, or pour the ginger beer into a glass carefully to
disturb the sediment as little as possible.
Fermentation Free
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I mentioned earlier the fermentation process produces a slight bit of
alcohol and, of course, lots of pressure. There are a few alternative
approaches if you are interested in making ginger beer but want to skip the
fermentation process.
Probably the easiest method is to take a tip from the OpenCola folks and first
make a flavored syrup. The syrup will be a ginger beer concentrate that you can
mix with off the shelf carbonated seltzer water or club soda.
Pick your favorite recipe and instead of using a gallon of water (and yeast)
use a quart or so of water. Put the water in a cooking pot, add the ginger and
spices, and then boil and steep for a while to extract the flavor. Add the
sugar and make sure it completely dissolves.
Now you have concentrated syrup. Cool it and store in the fridge. To make a
glass of ginger beer put a little concentrate in a glass, add seltzer water and
stir well. You might lose fizz during this process, hopefully not all over the
counter. Adding ice first may help to tame it.
Another option is to use a water carbonater, something like the Soda Siphon.
These use a CO2 cartridge to force carbon dioxide into a liquid.
I haven't tried one but I suspect it's best to use it to "carbonize" the water
and then add that to your flavor syrup. If you put non-concentrated ginger beer
in the container you run the risk of clogging the parts and will have a bigger
cleanup job ahead of you.
BTW, if you come up with a killer ginger beer recipe please feel free to
contact me and I'll add it to the collection.
Ginger Beer Lite
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6/14/2004: Summer is back, at least in North America (this article gets lots of
New Zealand and Australia visitors during our Winter) and time for more Ginger
Beer brewing. I've tried a few experiments since last updating these pages and
here's what I've learned along with a new recipe.
First off I tried using a champagne yeast instead of bread yeast. It seemed a
lot slower to start and really didn't kick in with lots of C02 generation like
we are used to. Since the resulting ginger beer wasn't as bubbly it was hard to
judge if there was much, if any flavor improvement. I've gone back to using
cheap and plentiful bread yeast, we've either gotten used to the flavor or I'm
using less of it.
Second experiment was a batch of fermentation free Ginger Beer. Basically a
syrup. I used two cups of water, a cup of sugar, and boiled it with the spices.
At the end we had a jar of dense, sticky ginger beer extract that was stored in
the fridge. My wife liked it because she could control the strength of it when
mixing it with carbonated water (seltzer). It was lacking something, in my
opinion, either not enough bubbles or I was missing the yeasty undertones. ":^)
The final and most recent experiment was with an almost-diet Ginger Beer. Since
it's still a fermented ginger beer you can't really cut out the sugar
completely or there won't be anything for the yeast to eat. As a bonus the
yeast does eat some of the sugar so that means less to consume in the final
drink.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons of cardamom pods
(or 1 teaspoon seeds)
2 sticks of cinnamon
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 teaspoons whole cloves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon licorice root
dash cream of tarter
dash cayenne pepper
1/4 cup ginger juice or half cup finely chopped ginger
1/2 cup sugar
1 gallon water
yeast
Put everything but the yeast in a pot and bring to a boil. I don't add the
ginger juice, but if you don't have a juicer you'll want to toss the chopped
ginger into the pot. Once it is boiling I turn it down and let simmer for a
long time. Ok, I completely spaced out about the pot and it ended up simmering
for about an hour. Let me tell you that was some dark, fragrant water!
About the time I start the water I usually put a teaspoon or so of sugar in a
cup with a 1/4 cup of warm water and sprinkle the yeast over it. Each time I
make ginger beer I use less and less yeast, presumably in the hope that there's
less yeast flavor (but it multiplies, so does that make sense?). The yeast
starts re-constituting and eating the sugar while we wait for the spices to
steep and then for the hot liquid to cool back down. Everything else follows
the steps in the basic recipe a few pages back.
It takes a little longer for the bubbles to get going, either from the decrease
in sugar or in yeast, but once it gets going it acts pretty much like any other
batch. With the latest batch I let it ferment in the bottles a little over
twenty four hours and the bottles were quite tight (pressurized).
What I ended up with was a nicely flavored, very bubbly Ginger Beer Lite with
just a slight hint of sweetness. I think the fennel seeds and licorice root
lend it a bit of smoothness and make it taste sweeter than it actually is. And,
as you can see from the photo, it really generates quite a head.
http://www.thehowzone.com/how/Making_Ginger_Beer/
--
_______________________________________________
Get your free email from www.doramail.com with 30 Megs of disk space in
webhosting and e-mail storage!
Powered by Outblaze
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/9rHolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HERB-RECIPE/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
