My yard looks haunted, with sheets and towels and tarps covering all of my tender plants. I am afraid that my tomatoes may be beyond help. The basil is probably toast as well. They just don’t handle the cold wind we have been cursed with for the past week. In an effort to make it feel a bit more like summer around here, I decided to mix up a batch of ginger ale. It isn’t hard to do although if you are inherently sloppy as I tend to be, it can get sticky.
You probably have all of the ingredients in your kitchen and most of the equipment too although a bottle capper is handy. You can make an acceptable batch of soda in screw top plastic bottles although I have heard they are more likely to explode.
I used a recipe for Virgin Island Ginger Beer from another Storey book, Homemade Root Beer Soda and Pop by Stephen Cresswell.
You need to grate 2 1/2 ounce of ginger root into a pot. Add the juice of 1/2 a lemon, 1 2/3 cups sugar and 2 quarts of water. Bring this to a boil and simmer uncovered for 25 minutes. Remove it from the heat and let it sit, covered, for another 1/2 hour. Pour 1 quart of cool water into a gallon jug the add the ginger mixture. Top off the jug with more water, leaving a 2 inch head space. You want the mixture to be just lukewarm. I needed to add cool water to get the temperature right. Shake the jug really well. Put 1/8 teaspoon ale yeast into 1/4 cup luke warm water. I used wine yeast but even plain bread yeast will do in a pinch. Wait about 5 minute and add the proofed yeast to the jug and shake it up again. Now you can bottle the soda. You will need 11 12 oz bottles. I like to use Corona beer bottles. They are clear so I can see that they are really clean and they don’t have screw caps. Of course this means that my kids are drinking from beer bottles. The kids, of course, think it’s very cool but I can see why another parent might have a problem with it. Just pour the soda into a cup if you do. You will need to use a funnel and a strainer to do this. A piece of cheese cloth in a funnel works too. Now cap the bottles and you’re finished. I bought a bottle capper and a large supply of caps at a wine and beer making supply store. You can get one from Lehman’s but it is a lot more expensive. Now comes the hard part. Patience. You need to wait 36 hours to check for fizzies. If it’s warm, that may be long enough. In this weather, with no heat on in the house, it may take 72 hours to ferment. When you see bubbles, put the soda in the refrigerator or down in the basement to keep it cool. Otherwise the fermentation will continue and the bottles may burst. That has never happened to me. My kids drink it up as soon as it’s ready.
The question I am often asked is, “Why bother?” Soda is cheap enough and this is a lot of work for 11 bottles of pop. I could, after all, make a batch of lemonade and have it ready in 5 minutes. The easy answer is that I just like knowing how to do things. It is fun to try something and have it be sucessful. It’ s actually fun to try something and have it bomb, then go back to the drawing board and figure out where I went wrong. I like knowing that if I had to, I could manage to make do with very little and still have a good time.
May 31, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Awesome. I just made a vanilla cherry cream soda from scratch. It tasted so great and gave me control of the ingredients. I’ll have to check out the books.
June 1, 2009 at 5:53 am
Did you just fool around with the ingredients and develope the recipe yourself? The book is very cool. Another one I like is Wild Wines and Mead. With all the honey I anticiapte for the fall, I am going to have to get serious about makeing mead. I hope I like it.
June 1, 2009 at 8:18 am
Kathy, there’s no sweetening/sugar in your gingerale? I tried to make gingerale once and it was just plain gross. Your recipe sounds a little different, most notably there’s no sugar/honey/syrup in it. How does it taste?
June 1, 2009 at 9:44 am
Do you use any sweetening? I didn’t see any listed
June 1, 2009 at 10:51 am
I need to do this. I’ve got a boatload of ginger in the freezer from a sale at an Asian market. A couple years ago, I made ginger beer using dried ginger. It was a different process – if I remember right, basically a small amount fermented for a week, fed daily, and this was then diluted with water and bottled, to ferment another week. You keep part of the starter and keep it going (like sourdough *grin*).
June 1, 2009 at 11:05 am
Oh my goodness-I forgot to add the 1 2/3 cups sugar to the simmering water and ginger. It would not only taste terrible but wouldn’t ferment either. I will edit the post right now.
June 1, 2009 at 1:13 pm
What a great post. I’ve just had a taste of my first home-made root beer. Nothing fancy–I used a store-bought extract in two-liter bottles–but it tasted good and was easy, and I can make it a little less sweet than store soda. Now I’m collecting strong beer bottles, I bought a bottle capper from my local brewing supply shop and I’ve ordered the roots so I can try making some the “old fashioned” way. I’m doing it for the same reason you are: it’s fun knowing how. Self-reliance is good. That, and I don’t have to put up with having it the way the factory makes it.
June 3, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Hey Kathy, can I pick your brain about Sassafras? We have a ton of it growing around our yard and I’m reading conflicting reports about it. Some say it’s fine, some say it’s deadly. I *know* I’ve had sassafras tea before and would love to harvest and brew my own if it’s not going to give me liver cancer. When you have a minute, could you give your thoughts on it?
June 3, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I am so jealous!!! I would love to have sassafras. I buy it from Frontier. I have recipes that call for 6 inch pieces of pencil thin sassafras root. I would not hesitate as long as I was certain about what it was. Where did you hear it was deadly? I have never heard that. I wonder if it is similar to sumac. I had always heard it was poison but it turns out that there is one poison variety and one that i terrific for you and they are nothing alike. I’ll bet the witer of Handmaiden’s Kitchen could tell you for sure. She knows way more about wild foods than I do.
June 3, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I have so much sassafras coming up in my herb garden that I have to move said herb garden to another site. I’m 95% sure that it’s sassafras as it’s got the 3 lobed leaves and stinks to high heaven of rootbeer (hate rootbeer, love sassafras tea…go figure).
I was researching a few days ago, trying to find a recipe for tea/drying the roots when I found a number of references to it being very very bad for you…causing liver problems, etc. Apparently the FDA outlawed it in the 60’s and the stuff they sell at the grocery store is so dumbed-down that it doesn’t actually qualify as sassafras. So now I’m perplexed. I have tons of the stuff and am afraid to use it.
Here’s a link for you…don’t know how reliable it is, but it *sounds* convincing.
http://www.chow.com/stories/10129
June 3, 2009 at 3:26 pm
http://www.familymedicinenews.org/archives/1999/2247(FM).html
Okay, last link, I promise. I found a balanced informative article about sassafras that has relieved my fears a good bit. And I called our local poison control. Both of them say enjoy it, but don’t drink too much. So guess what I’m making when the rain slows down???
June 3, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I am so glad it will work. I love it when you link. I learn and so does everbody else. I am drinking the ginger ale. It is really good and fizzy.