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Why buy soft drinks when you can make your own that taste better and are better for you? Laziness is a valid excuse but then why are you still reading this?
Loosly following this recipe from Alton Brown with a few tweaks. And of course in the future I will be altering this recipe further making it better and more awesome.
- What you’ll need:
- 1½ ounces finely grated fresh ginger
- 6 ounces sugar (2/3 cup)
- 7½ cups filtered water
- 1/8 teaspoon champagne yeast
- 2 tablespoons lemon juice
I wasn’t exactly sure how much ginger constituted 1½ ounces but I figured that more was better, I grated until I had a decent little pile of ginger pulp. For my next batch I will use more. So grate your ginger until you’re satisfied with the amount you have.
Next put your grated ginger, the sugar and ½ cup of water into a sauce pan and stir over medium high heat until all of the sugar is dissolved. Then remove from heat, cover the pan and let it steep and cool for about an hour.
Once the hour is up pour the ginger syrup through a fine mesh screen into a bowl or glass (if you don’t have a fine mesh screen you can use a coffee filter the point is to get the bigger chunks of ginger out of the syrup). Squeeze the ginger pulp and try to get as much syrup out as possible.
Once the syrup is filtered place your bowl of syrup into an ice (or cold water) bath or in the fridge and cool it down to between 68° and 72° F. You don’t want it too hot for the yeast you’re going to be adding soon.
Using a funnel, pour the ginger syrup into an empty 2 liter soda bottle. Then add your 1/8 teaspoon of Champagne yeast. You can use active dry yeast if you don’t have access to a homebrew shop, but Champagne Yeast is the best for making soft drinks. The baking yeast will leave a bready/yeasty flavor in your Ginger Beer.
Once you have added the yeast add the additional seven cups of water to the bottle. Cap it and let it set in a warm place for 48 hours. The yeast will metabolize some of the sugar into alcohol and CO2. Since the bottle is sealed the CO2 will dissolve into the ginger beer, thus carbonating it. After your two days are up, give it a try. If you want more carbonation reseal the bottle and leave it out longer, if it’s good then chill it in your fridge. The coldness of the fridge should stop the yeast but to be safe unseal the bottle daily to let off any additional pressure. Unless of course you like exploded ginger beer all over the inside of your fridge.
This yielded some pretty darn good ginger beer, I must say. Though I’m a big ginger fan so I want more ginger flavor next time. I will also be experimenting with adding some other spices into the mix: nutmeg, cinnamon, and possibly cayenne?