Here’s my simple recipe for a homemade alcoholic Ginger beer. It’s cheap, really easy to do and doesn’t require too much specialist equipment or any hard-to-get ingredients. Once you have the basic stuff you can pick everything up from a Supermarket

Equipment





5 gallon fermenting barrel (ideally with a tap to make bottling easier)

Bottles - I use old 2 litre lemonade bottles

Bruclens cleaner and steriliser

Hydrometer (optional) – for working out alcohol content





Ingredients





250g grated fresh root Ginger

Juice of 2 lemons

2kg sugar

1 teaspoon powdered ginger

Water

5g/1 teaspoon Dried Yeast (ideally brewing yeast but I often use bread yeast)





Instructions





First, you need to sterilise the fermenting barrel following the instructions.





Mix the lemon juice and the fresh and powdered Ginger in a big pan and fill with water. I use a stock pot that holds about 4 litres. Gradually bring to the boil and then add the sugar, stirring to dissolve. You now have a Ginger flavoured syrup





Pour all the mixture into the fermenting barrel and top up with cold water to 5 gallons. You could filter out the solid bits at this stage but I think you get more flavour from the Ginger this way.





Sprinkle the yeast over the top, put the lid on and move the barrel somewhere warm (around 20 °C) and leave to ferment. If you have a Hydrometer now is the time to take your first reading, mine were approximately 1.054. Bubbles should start to form on top after the first 24 hours and if there’s an airlock on the barrel you should start to hear gurgling noises.





After 10-14 days (the brewing time is dependent on a number of factors such as temperature and the type of yeast). You can take another reading with the hydrometer to see if things have slowed down (somewhere around 1.015). If you haven’t got a hydrometer it’s not always easy to tell whether fermenting has stopped. Bubbles should have stopped coming through the airlock. If in doubt you could try a tasting sample and if the flavour is still sweet it needs a while longer. You can be fairly patient at this stage, as leaving it for an extra day or two shouldn’t do much harm.





Add a teaspoon of sugar per litre of liquid to each sterilised bottle and fill them up, leaving a couple of inches of space at the top to allow for when the pressure builds. At this stage the ginger has added its flavour, so unless you want bits floating in your drink it’s probably best to sieve the solid lumps out. Be careful not to disturb too much of the sediment or this will end up in your drink later.





Leave the Ginger Beer for another week or so for the remaining sugar to ferment and make it fizzy and then move to somewhere relatively cool for storage.





Now the best bit. The Ginger beer is ready to drink! There will probably be some sediment at the bottom of the bottles so pour carefully.





Results





I’ve made this a few times with fairly decent results. The ginger flavour seems to mellow over time so isn’t as fiery as I’d like and overall the drink is very dry. Using this quantity of sugar it normally turns out somewhere between 5% and 7%. You can either enjoy it served chilled on its own or add something to sweeten it such as lemonade or even fruit juice.





*** Quick warning the bottles can be very, very fizzy so need to be opened with caution ***





Obviously you can tinker with the recipe as you like to add different flavours. I’ve previously tried adding cinnamon, chilli, and even blackcurrants to give a different flavour all with pretty good results. Bear in mind that different ingredients may have an effect on the fermentation process.



