I brew my own Ginger Ale.

I started doing this, I think, in February 2008. Melissa had bought a book called Wild Fermentation, which was about using bacterial/yeast cultures to brew drinks and make food through fermentation. I’ve made over a dozen batches, and although I’m still improving on my recipe, it tastes pretty good!

My Ginger Ale recipe is essentially three food ingredients + the micro-organism culture.

• Ginger Root (grated)
• Lemon (sometimes lime also, and I’m experimenting with other flavor additives)
• Sugar (white)

That’s it.

The carbonation comes from the fermentation of sugar, via the Wild Yeast. This is the same kind of fermentation process that brewers use to make ethanol (drinking alcohol) although this particular process / yeast culture does not produce a substantial amount of alcohol. (If there is any, it is barely noticeable, and largely depends on how long you let it ferment). The main by-product is carbonation (CO₂) and awesome.

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Categories: Foodities, Sustainable Living
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Root Beer, version 1 (1 June 2008)

Boil the following ingredients:

6 oz Sassafrass tea extract (Saffrole free! This is important!)
1/4 oz Anise seeds, ground to a powder
2 cups white sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses
2 qts water
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature and add:

2 qts water
1 tbsp Vanilla Extract
4 drops Wintergreen Essential Oil (dissolve in 2 tsp of Honey first)
Ginger bug(*)

(* The ginger bug is a wild yeast culture grown with sugar and grated ginger root — I’ll do a separate post about growing that. It’s necessary for fermentation.)

I’ve let mine brew for 6 days so far, and cracked open my first bottle yesterday, and second bottle today. I have one last bottle in the fermenter (a cabinet) right now, which I’ll pull tomorrow, to see if 7 days makes a difference.

The flavor is pretty good - the molasses flavor is a little too heavy, but it carbonated well and had a nice foamy head. I’m going to try using half as much (1/8 cup) next batch. The wintergreen wasn’t prominent enough, so I’ll try increasing that by 50% (6 drops). The sassafrass flavor was very abundant as well, I can probably scale that back a little bit. Beyond those three alterations, this was remarkably good for a first batch — if I were to give it to someone without telling them what it was, they would surely know it was Root beer.

So changes for version 1.1:

• 1/8 cup Molasses
• 6 drops Wintergreen extract in 3 tsp of honey
• 4 oz Sassafrass tea extract

Categories: Foodities, Sustainable Living
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