Ginger Beer

This is a fun and easy drink to make. It can be alcoholic or not, so it’s great drink for anybody.

I found a simple recipe online and then started tweaking it to suit my taste. By my fourth attempt, I feel like I have a recipe that I really enjoy and would repeat. That being said, I will probably still experiment with different tweaks to the recipe, for example I am curious to try cane sugar instead of classic granulated sugar which I have used to date. I’ll share my most recent iterations of the recipe.

Ginger Beer – Take 4 (My preferred recipe so far)

First thing you need to do is make the syrup. Ingredients below:

• 1/2 cup water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 5 tbsp ginger (fresh)
• 1 tbsp chilli flakes
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon

Directions

Place the water and sugar in a saucepan. Add in ginger, chilli flakes and cinnamon. Heat the syrup until it is just starting to bubble. I let it cool, and then heated it one more time. I did this because I was trying to draw the spice out of the chilli flakes. I also didn’t let mine boil as my assumption is it would kill some of the flavours by boiling it. I’m no chef though, so feel free to try.

Once cooled, you now have your syrup. Strain it out into a container.

Then you can make the liquid base:

• 7 cups of water
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
• Syrup that you made above

Get a 2L bottle and fill it with 7 cups of water. Squeeze the lemon juice into the water. Add in the yeast and then pour in the syrup.

Give the bottle a good shake to get the yeast moving instead of settling at the bottom.

Then store the bottle somewhere dark and room temperature for 3 days. The yeast begins to eat all the sugar you put into the syrup which produces carbon dioxide as a by-product, as well as ethanol. If you leave the ginger beer to ferment long enough it will become alcoholic from the build up of ethanol. I also assume it would become less sweet as more sugar is eaten up.

I haven’t tested it any shorter or longer, all my attempts have been 3 days. I typically drink a lot of it right away and have not had any dizziness or anything hinting that it is alcoholic by day 3 so if you are avoiding alcoholic, you’re most likely fine for 3 days but don’t hold me to that.

This batch I felt had the perfect amount of carbonation. It still exploded a bit when I opened, but not nearly as much as the batch below. The recipe below produced the most explosive batch I made. I opened it and the drink rocketed out of the bottle despite the same fermentation time. My first two batches did not include cinnamon and were much less carbonated, so my guess is cinnamon is providing more ammunition for the yeast to eat. I also put in twice as much cinnamon in the batch below which likely explains why it was more carbonated than this one. Too much cinnamon also gives it an ugly brown colour, whereas less or none is a nice yellow color.

I also switched to lemons in this batch and preferred it to lime.

I’ll also say using fresh, instead of frozen ginger made a big difference in terms of that spicy ginger kick (what a novel thought that fresh ginger is better than frozen, I know).

Ginger Beer – Take 3

As I mentioned above, I did not like this recipe as much. I think there was too much cinnamon. The colour wasn’t appealing and it seemed to be more fermented after 3 days. I also used limes instead of lemon. Detailing the difference in the recipe below.

Syrup:

• 1/2 cup water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 5 tbsp ginger (frozen in this iteration as I didn’t have fresh)
• 1 tbsp chilli flakes
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Directions:

Same as above recipe

Liquid base:

• 7 cups of water
• Juice of 2 limes
• 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
• Syrup that you made above

Same directions as recipe above.

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