These are my notes on making ginger beer. Ginger beer is a fermentation that uses just sugar, ginger, and water to ferment yeast. According to my research, the ginger itself has yeast in it, that when
introduced to the sugar/water environment creates good fermentation. The ginger also has anti-microbial properties that help it stay safe to consume even though there is no salt to prevent bad bacteria
and yeast from being introduced (like you would see in a lacto fermentation). What follows are notes and various attempts at making ginger beer.
The recipe I based this off of is Brad Leone's from his show "It's alive" but I've done two main modifications. First is I've reduced
the recipe size. This is partly because I don't have jars large enough to do a whole batch in one jar. Second, in the episode he bumps up the amount of ginger but seemingly leaves the rest the
of the ingredients the same. As a result, I wanted to see if the increase in ginger without the increase in sugar made a difference. So for this recipe / experiment, I am doing two batches
| Batch A | Batch B |
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For both of these batches, I diced the ginger rather than grating it after peeling it. I started trying to grate it, but it seemed to just turn the ginger into mush instead of doing anything
meaningful to the ginger. From there I added the ingredients to two different jars and left them to ferment on my counter in the kitchen. This area of my kitchen is usually around the 70F
range but sometimes dips down into the mid to upper 60s.