Ginger Ale

[Juana]

Recipe:
2 tablespoons of grated ginger
1 cup white sugar
1 whole lemon
1/8 teaspoon or even less of yeast
A half gallon of filtered water

1. With a funnel, pour sugar and yeast into the bottle.
(boring, so no picture)

2. Finely grate the ginger and place in a measuring cup.


3. Squeeze the lemon's juice into the measuring cup and mix with the ginger.


4. Pour the mixture through the funnel into the bottle. Use a straw to push the pulp into the bottle and pour the water in. Put cap on and shake until sugar is dissolved. Set the bottle in a warm (not hot) place for 24 hours.


It's currently sitting my garage, and I'll know it's any good by 5pm tomorrow. I used regular baking yeast, which I have heard mixed results on. If it's not good, I'll spend the extra dough on beer yeast, I suppose.

[Don Coyote]

This has my interest. If it works out ok for yo I might do something similar.

[Juana]

The baking yeast seems to work fine, it just has too much ginger. I'm going to drop it by half and report back.

[Triple Zero]

At which point were you planning on adding the water?

[Juana]

Oh. Step three. Didn't notice the missing instruction. Thanks for catching that.

[Adios]

Ginger is so ugly, and so yummy when used correctly.

[Richter]

Nice!
I ought to do this, if not brew some other stuff.

[Triple Zero]

question, you use 0.5 gallon water. that's 1.9L.

the bottle in the picture seems about the size it would fit 2L, but it's only half full? Is that really a 1 gallon bottle?

seriously, your measures keep confusing me, the portions are always so big!!

an entire cup (236ml) of sugar seems like quite a lot as well. think I'm gonna go with about half or 2/3 of that.

[Juana]

I had pretty much copy-pasted the recipe from that site. And I just looked at the gallons-liters conversion and I have no idea why that's that off. That is a gallon bottle, apparently, even though I recall it saying it was a two liter one.  Sorry.

I didn't taste too much sugar around the super-strong ginger, and I intend to drop that by half next time I make it, so let me know how that goes, please?

[Triple Zero]

yup!

.. I think it's done.

I used:

- one lemon
- 150g sugar (5.3oz)
- some amount of ginger, I think a bit more than 2 tbsp.
- 1 packet of bread yeast
- a 1.5L plastic bottle (0.4 gallons)

I keep my ginger in the freezer cause a medium sized root doesn't keep long enough in the fridge before it dries out.

I peeled and chunked the ginger. Squeezed the lemon, but not before I peeled off a few good slices of its skin (using a potato-peeler), I really recommend this, lemon zest adds a really bright lemon flavour without making it more sour. To give comparison, zest tastes more like the kind of lemon flavour in hard lemon candy than like lemon juice.

Put the ginger chunks, bit of lemon juice, sugar, half the packet of yeast and zest into a glass jar and attacked it with the blender-onna-stick until it was mush.

Anyone got an idea, can you kill yeast with a blender? I supposed they would be too small to get too damaged.

I think I let the yeast "sit" for a while here, actually that was with just a littlebit of ginger and a littlebit of sugar. But to be fair, I never really got the point of doing that, the yeast will come alive in the bottle too.

Then I funneled it into the bottle, added the rest of the lemon juice, and topped it up with water, using the water to clean out the jar making sure I got all the bits of ginger and juice.

Then I shaked, and waited about one night and a morning. Then after some more shaking and checking it out, I decided the flavours had enough time to do their thing and I poured everything through a sieve+funnel into another bottle, to get the bits out. I don't like bits, in my experience they can introduce off-flavours and also slow down the process of clearing the liquid. Though usually I wait a couple of days before filtering the bits, but Ginger Ale is apparently a fast brewer

Then since the yeast was doing very little I feared I might have blended it to death, so I added the other half of the packet of yeast.

Then I waited one more day, and whooo the bottle is indeed under pressure So I put it in my fridge to keep it cool and slow the yeasting process (too much pressure and it'll fizz all over the place when you open it).

But I think this yeast was crap. "Best before" date said DEC 2010 as well. I dunno, a couple of years back I had great results with exactly this brand of bread yeast, but this one barely came alive when I let it "sit" and only started building up pressure in the bottle after a day or so.

Maybe nobody actually buys yeast anymore, I think I got all of those packets at the same supermarkt (over years) and perhaps they were all from the same stock/batch, aging and getting more crappy over time.

So, the taste. It's pretty good! I think it's too yeasty, though. And this yeast gives a weird "medicine" flavour sometimes. I dunno. Was slightly too sweet (IMO) so when I poured my first glass I just topped the bottle with water again and give it a gentle shake. You really need to experiment with the amount of lemon zest a bit, it gives a great flavour, but after having finished the glass for a while, I think it lingers a bit too long.

I think for my next experiments I'm gonna try growing some of my own yeast. Sounds like a fun experiment. Also when the apocalypse comes, I'll know how to make booze, so better get some practice in making yeast out of thin air then eh

There was a recipe on Reddit a while ago for ginger ale, but I can't find the exact same one anymore, so browse around.

Looks like Alton Brown covered it in one of his Good Eats shows, gonna download and watch it soon I think:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/ginger-ale-recipe/index.html

Searchquery on Reddit: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!reddit+ginger+ale

[Triple Zero]

from the Alton Brown website:

It is important that once you achieve your desired amount of carbonation that you refrigerate the ginger ale. Store in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks, opening the bottle at least once a day to let out excess carbonation.

After 48 hours at room temperature, the yeast flavor was still wild and unpleasant. However, after another week in the refrigerator, that flavor had dissipated. The key to minimizing the yeast flavor, therefore, seems to be to let it settle to the bottom of the container, which takes several days.

I believe this is correct. When active, yeast is very very fine dust, and takes several days before it settles to the bottom. Settling also makes the liquid clearer.

I already have a littlebit of sediment at the bottom of my bottle. I think maybe tonight I'll pour it back over into the other bottle, to get rid of the sediment (also helps with clearing the liquid).

Another way to clear the liquid is to add calcium, in the form of crumbled egg shells. I never tried this, but came across it in several recipes for brewing booze.

[Juana]

Hm. I think I'll try your method, since you definitely seem to know a hell of a lot more about this than I do. Thanks!

[Triple Zero]

Drank about half of it today, filled it up with apple juice and some honey. Gonna see if I can up the alcohol content a littlebit