Ginger beer at home – 3 simple recipes

Modern ginger beer is mostly a ginger-flavoured non-alcoholic sweetened soda, the depersonalized ingredient in yet another Moscow Mule. But this drink dates back long before John Gilbert Martin bought Smirnoff and met Jack Morgan in 1941. And now you will find out how ginger beer differs from ginger ale and what it has in common with real Russian kvass.

The origin of ginger beer is associated with the trade of colonial spices from the east and the extraction of cane sugar in the Caribbean islands. It has been a very popular drink in Great Britain and its colonies since about the 18th century. The fermented mixture of ginger, water and sugar was later flavored with other spices, and the alcohol content was limited to 1855% by excise taxes from 2 – not many brewers continue to brew an alcoholic product. Beer is very different from ginger ale, which is essentially just a ginger flavored, lightly fermented drink. Ginger beer is necessarily subjected to heat treatment, and it is also a product of double fermentation, and this is perhaps its main highlight.

The so-called “ginger beer plant” (GBP, also known as “Bee wine”, “California bees”) is a kind of symbiosis of a fungus, yeast Saccharomyces florentinus, and bacteria (Lactobacillus hilgardii). This tandem, where yeast creates alcohol and bacteria convert it into fatty acids, looks like a gelatinous substance that, like kefir grains or kombucha, can be easily transferred from one fermentation substrate to another.

The original ginger beer was brewed solely with water, sugar, ginger, and “ginger beer starter” to which lemon juice and cream of tartar could be added if desired. In this, the drink is very similar to real bread kvass, a product of double fermentation, the result of the same symbiosis between wild yeast and rye sourdough lactobacilli.

Traditional ginger beer based on “ginger beer sourdough”

Peel and finely grate the ginger, then place it in a canvas bag and send it to a jar of a suitable volume. Add sugar, lemon juice, cream of tartar and pour boiling water over everything. Wait until the water has cooled to room temperature, add GBP and mix well. Cover the jar with a thick cloth and leave in a dark place at room temperature for about 5 days. After that, the finished ginger beer can be poured through a sieve into plastic bottles and left in the refrigerator for aging. After 2-3 days, beer can be drunk or used to make cocktails, but it is better to wait a week. Before tasting beer can be sweetened to taste and add lemon juice to it. The “sourdough” remaining in the jar, which should grow a little in size, must be rinsed with clean water and used to prepare the next batch of the drink.

All recipes can be supplemented with your favorite spices and non-sulphated dried fruits to taste. Spices are especially useful for a sourdough recipe, as the first batches of a drink on GBP may not have a very pleasant smell – the sourdough needs to adapt to the environment. You can also add fresh fruits and berries, their juices and fruit drinks.

And where can I get this “sourdough”? – you ask. Only in the bourgeois Internet, where the GBP is getting smaller and smaller (until recently it was on Amazon, but it dried up there too). The price for such an animal, by the way, is more than $20. In general, an idea for whom? That’s right, for a rare aesthete. Even bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts refuse such troubles. Therefore, for cocktails it is customary to use a completely different version of ginger beer, non-alcoholic, without fermentation, but with a very expressive ginger profile.

Paul Clark’s non-alcoholic ginger beer for cocktails

The recipe belongs to cocktail enthusiast Paul Clarke (who, in turn, borrowed it from the legendary mixologist Audrey Sanders, who loves to use all sorts of homemade crafts in cocktails). We got acquainted with the result of his work before – in the article with recipes for quick liqueurs there is a recipe for falernum syrup-liqueur, on which Paul worked for about a year. The ginger beer prepared according to the recipe below is a concentrate and is not intended to be drunk on its own. To use it in cocktails, add 1 part soda to 1 part syrup. For drinking pure soda, it is better to take many times more, about 1: 4, while you can add a sweetener in the form of sugar syrup or honey, as well as lime or lemon juice for sourness.

Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan, turn off the heat and add finely chopped ginger with bay leaf. Cover the pan with a lid and leave the contents to be extracted for at least 4 hours, and preferably overnight. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth, squeeze the ginger lightly. Add sugar and lime juice, pour into bottles and store in the refrigerator. It is advisable to use ginger beer within 2 weeks – the aroma of ginger quickly degrades.

Alcoholic ginger beer

Well, where without a conditionally alcoholic version of the drink, we don’t have a “lemonade diary”, do we? By the way, you can ferment up to 11% alcohol in this way. The recipe is an old one, proposed by food writer Lindy Wildsmith for the British edition of the Telegraph. Very similar to ginger ale, but with its own characteristics.

Gently remove the zest from half a lemon, and then squeeze the juice out of it, which it is advisable to strain through a sieve before using. Boil water in a saucepan of suitable volume, remove from heat, add peeled and finely chopped ginger, sugar, cream of tartar, lemon zest and juice, mix well until sugar is completely dissolved. Wait until the mixture cools down to 30^оC, and while this is happening, grind the yeast with powdered sugar. When the mixture has cooled, add the prepared starter to it, cover with gauze and leave overnight at room temperature. The impromptu wort will foam up a lot, so the pot can be placed in a wide bowl.

In the morning, strain the fermenting drink into a jug, and then pour it into a plastic bottle under the lid with a watering can. Leave the bottle for 2-3 days at room temperature, and then put it in the refrigerator for a week or two for aging. The bottle should be opened very carefully because of the accumulated carbon dioxide in it. If desired, you can increase the alcohol level in beer by periodically adding sugar to it, but then it is better to keep the drink in a container on which you can install a water seal or at least put on a rubber glove with a hole in one of the fingers.

Ginger Beer Cocktails

On the Moscow Mule, the world did not converge like a wedge. We offer several cocktail recipes, where one of the main roles is assigned to ginger beer.