The other day I had a craving for a Rum and Ginger beer/ale like you would get in the Caribbean. I was disappointed when I realized that almost all of the ginger ale options here in the states are lame and have no kick to them. After a little research I found a simple recipe from the Alton Brown show here and decided to give it a try.
Ingredients needed were the following:
Filtered water
Empty 2 liter soda jug
Sugar
Ginger-Freshly grated
Active Dry yeast
Lemon Juice-Fresh squeezed
I started off by grating some ginger on my microplane.
Grating Ginger with microplane
The recipe called for 1.5 oz of ginger, but I wanted mine to have a bit more kick so I put in 2 oz.
microplaned ginger in bowl
Next the recipe calls for mixing the ginger, sugar and a half cup of water in a small sauce pan and heating it over med-high until the sugar dissolves
Sugar, ginger, 1/2 cup of water combined
Once you have heated the mixture enough to dissolve all of the sugar cover it up and let it steep for 1 hour.
Go work on something else for an hour!
Next pour this mixture through a metal strainer. The recipe calls for compressing the solid material in the strainer to get all of the juice out, i found that a folded paper towell does a good job of this. All that i had left was a dry pulpy substance afterwards.
Straaaaaain it
Following this basically just mix up the rest of the ingredients in the bottle. Which are 7 more cups of filtered water (I used distilled), 2 Tbsp oz lemon juice, and 1/8 tsp active dry yeast. Then just seal the bottle and let it sit at room temperature for 48 hours to ferment. It is important that you don’t leave fermenting for too long as it can build up excess pressures. If you store it at temps warmer than around 70 degrees Fahrenheit check it at one day by lightly squeezing the bottle and feeling for pressure. I’ve made some of this before using a slightly different recipe and at 75 deg or so it was pretty flat still after one day.
Ferminting….pretty exciting stuff
A storage note…this stuff keeps fermenting while its in the bottle so make sure to release the pressure, the recipe says at least once a day so that’s probably a safe schedule to go by. Also store it in the fridge after its initial 48 hour period of fermentation to slow down fermentation after this point.
-I’ll post a follow up in a few days to let you know how it tastes
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