A little bit sweet and spicy, homemade ginger beer is a great easy fermentation project for beginners and a nice project to branch into if you’re more experienced with fermenting. You’ll need a ginger bug for this recipe and once you have that you can have a limitless supply of naturally fermented soda pop!

For the bug you need ginger, sugar, and water. I don’t sweeten the ginger beer with sugar, just apple juice, so it’s a bit less sweet than store-bought versions. Some lemon rounds things out and the base is made from a strong ginger tea. I recommend adding some ginger shots to the mixture to really boost the spicy ginger flavour, but that’s completely up to you.

We love ginger beer so much that I made about a dozen bottles (and at least a dozen more of kombucha) for our small wedding in 2017. It’s always a hit even with people who aren’t used to fermented drinks. You can use it to make mixed drinks, too, like this orange ginger beer mocktail.

If you have my cookbook you’ll know that I also included a recipe for ginger beer there. This isn’t much different from the version in my book, but of course I can include much more helpful information here.

Ingredients

Ingredient Notes and Substitutions

• Ginger bug: your bug should have been fed the night before so that it’s bubbly and active.
• Apple juice: unsweetened, preferably not from concentrate. If you don’t have apple juice, you can add sweetener to the tea instead but I haven’t tested the amounts that would be needed. You could probably use orange juice too.
• Lemon: a squeeze of lemon juice adds a bit more bite to the ginger beer.
• Ginger: this is used to make the ginger tea base.

Step by Step

First you’ll have to make your ginger bug, so prepare that at least three days in advance before you plan on making the ginger beer.

Step 1: add the ginger and water to a large pot.

Step 2: bring to a low boil, then simmer for at least half an hour. Cool fully before straining.

Step 3: add to bottles with the bug, juice, and lemon juice.

Step 4: ferment at room temperature for three days or more, depending on temperature.

Recipe Notes

As with any fermented drink, you will need to be careful that it doesn’t build up too much pressure in the bottle when fermenting. I have had explosions. When we had record breaking heat in the Netherlands, and the house was almost 40°C, a bottle exploded less than an hour after I had burped it. (We weren’t in the kitchen, and everything was fine.) If it’s warm, take precautions.

Some people keep their ginger beer bottles in some kind of sealed container with a lid when fermenting, and if you are very cautious, it’s not a bad idea. It’s certainly safer. Others will use plastic bottles rather than glass but since we’re a mostly plastic-free household so that’s not something I’ve ever tried. Otherwise keep an eye on them and change what you’re doing depending on the temperature of your home.

If you find that the drink isn’t sweet enough for you once it’s ready to refrigerate, you can add another glug of apple juice (either to the bottles, or in glasses when serving) or mix with some simple syrup. I’ve never tried with the syrup but it should work well. Be sure not to add it before fermenting or it will change the timing outlined by a significant margin.

A little space is left at the top of the bottle so that the bubbles have somewhere to go. There needs to be some space for the gas build-up – this helps prevent it from blowing up.

How to Store

Once the ginger beer is very bubbly and at the point you’d like it to be, store the bottles in the refrigerator. Note that the activity will reduce once the bottles are chilled and the beer will be much less bubbly. I usually take mine to the point that they overflow when burped so that they’ll still nicely carbonated when cold.

Expert Tips

• Use it more than once: I use the same ginger to make 2-3 batches of tea for ginger beer, storing it in the refrigerator with some water in between. It only lasts for a few days but if you’re going through a lot of the pop, you can do this rather than tossing the ginger each time.
• Try with juice: if you don’t want to mix up the ginger shots to add extra spiciness, you could also use ginger juice. Grate the ginger and then press through a sieve to extract the juice and add some of that to the mix. Some stores will sell ginger juice in bottles, too, and that works well. I add about three tablespoons per bottle but you’ll have to do some trial and error depending on your personal tastes.
• Add extras: consider this to be a base recipe, or starting point, and you can add different flavour variations to it. Much like kombucha, various fruits can be added to ginger beer after bottling to add flavour and speed up the fermentation process. I particularly like raspberries.

More Drink Recipes

Lemon Ginger Turmeric Tea
Strawberry Mint Lemonade sweetened with honey
Honey Lilac Syrup
Honey Elderflower Cordial