Ginger Beer / Ale / Soda
December 9, 2007
3L of Ginger Beer(Click to embiggen.)
Yesterday Danielle and I stopped by Cap N Cork so I could check out prices of the champange bottles for when I finally get around to bottling the cider. While there we picked up stuff to make soda (basically, a small funnel, yeast, and some soda flavor).
Today we made it. 383g of cane sugar, a bit of honey, 2.5 tsp of ginger flavor, yeast, and 3L of water went into the three bottles. That’s it sitting right there. The rightmost bottle also has minced ginger in it, to boost the flavor. Hopefully it’ll be good.
how much yeast do you use for a bottle? I have rootbeer fixins here, and Id love to make it fizzy without having to make it with seltzer water …
I think we used 1/8th of a tablespoon for the full 3L. The thing you need to be careful of is how long you let it ferment for.
See, the regardless of how much yeast you put in it, it’ll multiply and consume ALL the sugar, unless stopped. This will lead to exploding bottles. (Ever seen a draino bomb? Same thing.)
So, you just put the yeast in, let it sit on the counter until the bottles are really hard (as hard as a normal soda bottle at room temperature — keep one around for comparison), then put them in the fridge. The cold temps will stop the fermentation.
If you take them out of the fridge and it warms up, it’ll keep fermenting and go boom, so be careful.
Oh, we used beer yeast, although you can probably use bread yeast without ill effects. There won’t be enough fermentation to really notice flavors from the yeast.
Do be sure not to drink this while driving or while at work, because it’s technically alcoholic, although only marginally so.