Ginger Beer (The "Real" Stuff made with Ginger Beer Plant)

[Chris Norrick]

I had a topic in the "What's In Your Fermenter" topic but I thought I'd split it out.

I received my culture of Ginger Beer Plant so I went ahead and rehydrated it and started a batch of Ginger Beer.

Here are some pics of what it looks like.

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This is the recipe and instructions I received with the culture. I followed them pretty closely on this first batch. The main deviation is I only used a lemon, no lime, and included the zest. I doubled everything and am using a 2 qt mason jar for a fermenter.

Basic Recipe:
Lemon Lime Ginger Beer
To make one quart (960 ml) of ginger beer, you'll need the following:
1 freshly cleaned two-quart (1920 ml) Mason wide mouth canning jar or similar container
1 quart (960 ml) of distilled or filtered water
12 tablespoons (180 ml) of white granulated sugar
4 teaspoons (20 ml) of limejuice
4 teaspoons (20 ml) of lemon juice
2 teaspoons (10 ml) of ginger root powder
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) of cream of tartar
3 tablespoons (45 ml) of ginger beer plant
A sieve, funnel, and muslin cloth
Empty bottles
Add Cayenne pepper or Tasmanian peppercorns for spicy ginger beer.

Instructions:
Dissolve sugar in water in Mason jar. Add ginger beer plant. Stir in remaining ingredients. Tightly seal jar. Place in warm location. In 24-48 hours, depending upon the season and temperature, gas bubbles will begin to ascend, turbidly will occur, and lid of Mason jar will become pressurized. When this occurs, strain liquid through a sieve into a fresh container. Retrieve grains and rinse thoroughly in cold water before reuse or storage. If needed, using a muslin cloth, strain liquid once more to remove ginger root powder. Funnel liquid into bottles. Leave one inch (2.5 cm) of headroom and tighten lid. Let sit undistributed in a warm location for 48-72 hrs to develop fizz and further the consumption of sugar. Development of fizz is indicated by the formation of small gas bubbles on the surface of the beverage. Chill for 24 hours or more and serve.

Using a larger fermentation jar, increase the amount of ginger beer plant by 3 tablespoonfuls for each additional quart of ginger beer desired.

Keep refrigerated until ready to consume. Fermentation will resume if returned to room temperature.

Note: The accumulation of spent yeast at the bottom of soda is normal and will be present in all of your homemade ginger beer. It's loaded with B vitamins and is quite good for you. Either drink it or pour carefully to keep it at the bottom.

[Chris Alvey]

Very interesting ... did you get a sense of what the plant (and your 'beer') tasted like?

[Chris Norrick]

I mixed this batch up last night and it started bubbling this morning, so no taste tests yet on the "Real™" stuff.

My fake stuff I made with ale yeast was good flat. It has a major ginger bite to it, plus alcohol! I think it will be a great summer drink. I've only tasted it flat but it's now fully carbed as of this morning so I put it in the fridge to cool and retard fermentation. I'll be trying it tonight at a party and will report.

[Chris Norrick]

Reference to the original post just to keep things together.

Ginger Beer (fake=yeast-based)

2 Liters filtered water
1.75 Cups Sugar
2 Tablespoons Fresh Grated Ginger Root (about 1 hand)
Juice and Zest of 1 Lemon
1/4 Teaspoon Cream of Tarter
1/4 Teaspoon Ale Yeast (US-56, WLP001, Muttons, etc) may need more with this OG

OG: 1.083

I sanitized everything, and dunked the ginger root in boiling water to sanitize. All ingredients were added to a 2 L bottle and foil placed on top for primary fermentation. In a few days I'll taste it and when it gets to be just a little too sweet I'll strain and bottle it in another 2 L bottle. Let it bottle condition until rigid then refrigerate. Glass could be dangerous.

Back Story
This is "fake" ginger beer. Real ginger beer is fermented with a funky composite organism called Ginger Beer "Plant" (GBP) and not brewers yeast. No one knows where the original GBP came from or who figured out to use it to ferment. The GBP is gelatinous grains like kefir grains that are much larger in appearance than dry yeast and can be easily strained out and transfered. It can't be made as it is not a pure strain, it is a symbiotic organism consisting of the yeast Saccharomyces florentinus (formerly Saccharomyces pyriformis) and the bacterium Lactobacillus hilgardii (formerly Brevibacterium vermiforme). It was just passed down generation to generation like a sourdough starter or friendship (Amish) bread starter. Once it's done fermenting you just strain it out of the beer and pitch it in the next batch. It should have grown some and can be split and shared. It was very popular to make Ginger Beer at home up to the 1920s in the US and 1950s in the UK. It seems the GBP almost went extinct during WWII due to rationing of things like sugar.

I've got some real GBP on order but in the meantime I made up this batch of "fake" Ginger Beer to compare it to the "real" stuff.

The Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_beer

[Chris Norrick]

Another recipe I'm playing with from Raj Apte. If you recognize the name, he did a lot of homebrew beer experiments using oak chair legs jabbed into carboys to simulate oak barrel aging. He is a huge contributor to the Ginger Beer Plant Yahoo group and was the first to get a pure culture from Germany and propagate it back into existence in the US.

I'm experimenting with Demerara & Turbinado sugar. The Turbinado is much lighter.

Place 150g (5.3 oz) of chopped fresh ginger and 150g (5.3 oz) of piloncillo or jaggery sugar
into 750ml water. Raise heat to simmer 5 minutes, then let cool.
Strain into tall glass jar with 2-4cc (3 Tbs) ginger beer plants. A day later,
the GBPs should be going up and down. Decant liquid into soda bottle (soda siphon),
using a strainer if needed to keep the plants out. Seal the charger,
wait 1-2 days, test, chill, and enjoy.

I leave just enough liquid in the glass to keep the GBPs covered. They
can stay that way for a few days on the counter. They multiply
rapidly.

I don't know what the cream of tartar that Ward mentions is for,
except maybe adding additional acidity. Sometimes I think a touch of
lemon would help, but I add it to the soda charger, not the primary
fermentation.

[Chris Norrick]

This is mostly a lacto fermentation so it will have some sour to it. Even though there is Saccharomyces florentinus in there it doesn't do the bulk of the fermentation, the Lactobacillus hilgardii does. The GBP also produces a lot of polysaccharides and makes the brew sort of viscous which contributes to a frothy head. At least that's the way it's supposed to go. The first batch of the "real" stuff is almost carbed so I'll soon find out.

BTW: after straining out the GBP from the first batch the volume just about doubled so I will soon have some to share if anyone is interested in this historical drink.

[Chris Norrick]

Just found this great explanation on real ginger beer on my Yahoo group:

The differences between a Real GBP and a yeast-based product are that the Real
GBP brew is frothier, smoother and thicker, tart rather than acid, and
pro-biotic (i.e. it contains live lactobacilli which are the natural healthy
bacteria that live in human body cavities and keep infectious bacteria away).

The Real GBP is a symbiotic organism made up of a lactobacillus (Lactobacillus
hilgardii) and a yeast (Saccharomyces piriformis). The lactobacillus produces a
rubbery gel which protects itself and the yeast, and the toxic waste products of
each are broken down by the other, so that they grow better together. The
"plant" consists of pieces of gel containing the bacteria and the yeast and it
grows during the fermentation, so that you can split it in half after a week and
pass on half to a friend. When you split the plant, you rinse it off with water
and this gets rid of other contaminating organisms, so the culture stays pure.
The ginger and (unrefined) sugar provides all the growth materials that the
plant needs.

Real GBP ferments sugar mainly to lactic acid and carbon dioxide. The
L.hilgardii probably breaks down most of the alcohol that the yeast produces, so
the ginger beer is virtually alcohol-free. The lactic acid gives the brew a
pleasant tart flavour (like yoghurt). In the second fermentation in bottles, the
gel produced stays in solution rather than becoming rubbery, and this thickens
the brew and makes it smooth and pleasant textured. The carbon dioxide builds up
pressure and so makes it fizzy.

The procedure for fermentation is to keep the plant in a covered (but not
airtight) jamjar (1-2 pound size), threequarters full of water, at room
temperature. Add 2 teaspoons of ground ginger and two teaspoons of unrefined
sugar at the start and then feed with one teaspoon of ground ginger and one
teaspoon of sugar each day for a week. Strain off the liquid through a sieve
into a jug, add sugar and water (one to two cups of sugar per 2 litres according
to taste) to make a total volume of 2 litres and transfer into plastic fizzy
drink bottles. The second fermentation lasts two weeks in a warm place (20-25
deg C). I leave mine sitting on top of my Pentium 4 PC. Then the brew can be
stored in a fridge until required. I drink it neat or as a mixer with whiskey
(delicious).

All containers need to be washed clean, but not sterilised. If you are going on
holiday, the Real GBP will keep in its jamjar in the fridge for several weeks
without feeding. If you dry it out between sheets of tissue it will keep for up
to a year, but takes a week or two of incubation to revive.

If you need a plant, send me an email and I'll post one to you (free), if you
agree to pass it on free to others.

Best Wishes

Frank

[john mills]

I'd like to have a taste first. The idea of drinking something without alcohol seems like a total waste of liver function.

[Chris Norrick]

John, I have a recipe here somewhere that adjusts the growing conditions to favor the yeast and produces a good alcohol brew. More things to experiment with! I've have several of these at SWIRCA for tasting!


Some more reference material.

Raj Apte interview with James Spencer of Basic Brewing Radio (2006): http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrew ... -31-06.mp3
Raj Apte PDF from AHA Conference Presentation (2006): http://www2.parc.com/emdl/members/apte/GingerBeer.pdf

Recipe and notes from the interview:
Not much sanitation is needed... the GBP is hard to kill or contaminate

Peal and blend ginger root with some water to form pulp, amount is dependent on how "hot" you want the drink (Raj uses a lot)
Microwave the pulp up to boiling then let it sit in the bowl overnight to extract a lot of the ginger=very "hot" drink
Press out the pulp to get all the good stuff (Raj uses a potato ricer)
Add to a 5-15% sugar solution (raw sugar)
Add some Cream of Tarter, 1g/L (probably used for Lacto health and head retention but sort of unknown)
Add some lemon to taste or play around with different spices (see PDF)
Add GBP (usually around 3 Tbs)

Ferment for 24 hrs at 86 F (30 C) (or set in a sunny window) will give medium sweetness, 2-4 days will get dryer
Bottle by straining out GBP and add liquid into a soda siphon or swingtop bottle and immediately refrigerate
Lager for 1 week in the fridge and you will get medium carbonation, refrigeration really slows down the GBP, more so than yeast

[john mills]

How's the GBP experiments coming? Anything with alcohol? Do you have any available for donation to a club raffle?

[Chris Norrick]

I've made a few batches of good Ginger Beer. None with much alcohol. The bad part is my GBP isn't multiplying like I though it would. I only have maybe a little more than I started with. I thought this would double on each batch and I would have it running out my ears but that hasn't happened. Information resources on the stuff are slim to none and the few people who mess with it all have differing opinions on how to grow it up. I guess what might work for one person doesn't work for another. I've tried a few of the suggested ways to get it to grow without success.