Further culinary strangeness
In the absence of a garden, I have taken to tending a glass jar full of a murky, milky, bubbling mush. I feed it daily with a spoonful of ginger and a spoonful of sugar, and keep it nestled warm & cosy beside the heating outlet in my bedroom.
It is a "ginger beer plant", a developing colony of little beasties that are in the business of turning sugar into alcohol. Well, it's mostly the yeast that's doing that, eating the sugar and shitting out carbon dioxide & alcohol, but my reading suggests that the addition of ginger means that there should be other beneficial bacterial and/or fungal life forms in there as well, getting in on the hot fermenting action.
I need to feed it for another few days before it'll be ready to strain out the liquid and bottle it up with sugar syrup to develop into either ginger beer or some kind of sugary explosive device (I have been extensively warned about the explosive possibilities if I get the bottling process wrong). I'm hoping to have a batch of ginger beer ready to consume before I leave in a couple of weeks- we'll see how THAT goes.
I'm specifically aiming for dry alcoholic ginger beer, which is why the long developing times. I think if you're aiming for low/non-alcohol varieties you can get it all done in a few days. There's a million different recipes out on the net, I've gone with a mish-mash of a bunch of them (so far, essentially: sugar, grated ginger, sachet of baking yeast, half a juiced lemon & a bit of lemon peel into a jar with some water, stir, continue to feed sugar & ginger daily).
I am quite taken with the evidence of life in my mysterious jar of gingery mush- it bubbles, it froths, it rearranges itself into funny strata of ginger, liquid & yeast gunk at the bottom of the jar. If this works, I think I'd like to take on brewing & fermenting as a regular old hobby: I mean first there's the fun of feeding it & watching it do it's thing, and then there's the PRACTICALLY FREE BOOZE. Just so long as the bottles don't detonate in the process, what's not to love?
It is a "ginger beer plant", a developing colony of little beasties that are in the business of turning sugar into alcohol. Well, it's mostly the yeast that's doing that, eating the sugar and shitting out carbon dioxide & alcohol, but my reading suggests that the addition of ginger means that there should be other beneficial bacterial and/or fungal life forms in there as well, getting in on the hot fermenting action.
I need to feed it for another few days before it'll be ready to strain out the liquid and bottle it up with sugar syrup to develop into either ginger beer or some kind of sugary explosive device (I have been extensively warned about the explosive possibilities if I get the bottling process wrong). I'm hoping to have a batch of ginger beer ready to consume before I leave in a couple of weeks- we'll see how THAT goes.
I'm specifically aiming for dry alcoholic ginger beer, which is why the long developing times. I think if you're aiming for low/non-alcohol varieties you can get it all done in a few days. There's a million different recipes out on the net, I've gone with a mish-mash of a bunch of them (so far, essentially: sugar, grated ginger, sachet of baking yeast, half a juiced lemon & a bit of lemon peel into a jar with some water, stir, continue to feed sugar & ginger daily).
I am quite taken with the evidence of life in my mysterious jar of gingery mush- it bubbles, it froths, it rearranges itself into funny strata of ginger, liquid & yeast gunk at the bottom of the jar. If this works, I think I'd like to take on brewing & fermenting as a regular old hobby: I mean first there's the fun of feeding it & watching it do it's thing, and then there's the PRACTICALLY FREE BOOZE. Just so long as the bottles don't detonate in the process, what's not to love?
2 Comments:
At 8:25 AM,
Miss Violette Thorngate said…
It's true what they say about exploding bottles. I have too many good explosion stories from my ginger beering adventures: somn public and incredible, some when no one was around like a tree falling in the forest, and some so spectacular and with only one witness: unbelievable by others!
At 3:19 PM,
Ali H said…
Ooh! What would your tips be to avoid/minimise the explosions? I was going to go with
1. Bottle into plastic rather than glass bottles
2. Leave a good amount of head-room (like 20% of the bottle-volume)
3. Check twice daily & release CO2 by loosening the caps.
Do you think that is sufficient to avoid total gingerbeer catastrophe, or should I be planning on mopping up at least a few wreckages?
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