welcome friends so I know we've been on a bit of a roll lately making syrups for
pop for soda pop if we take a step back probably five or six years ago we did a
ginger syrup as part of a cocktail video series that we were making at the time
and since then we've also built ourselves a little brewery in our
basement and we brew beer all the time and one of the things I like to throw
into that sort of brewing process is making naturally fermented ginger beer
and so in order to start that natural fermentation process you need natural
organic ginger root like this and you need to chop it up and start the process
of allowing the yeast and the bacteria and all of the biome that is growing on
the outside of this ginger you need to sort of coax that to life and get it
really rocking and rolling and it's a process that takes somewhere between
three to five days and it just starts out with a little piece of ginger like
this so I've got about 30 grams of ginger here and when I say 30 grams you
don't need to be exact if you grab a piece and it's 25 you're fine if you
grab a piece and it's 50 you're fine but if you can weigh it that's great and you
want to just chop it up you don't have to chop it up too fine you just need to
chop it up to release some of the flavor from the inside and also to increase the
surface area just run a knife through it is gonna get you there now you don't
want to peel it contrary to so many sort of vanity blog posts that I read where
they tell you to peel the ginger first you don't want to peel it and the reason
you don't want to peel it is what you're trying to encourage is all of the
bacteria and yeast that lives on the outside of the ginger you want to get
that growing and if you peel off the outside of the ginger you're going to
peel away most of the things that you want so you have to leave the peel on so
I put this into this is 500 mils of water which is
two cups generally and then to this I want to add two tablespoons of white
sugar now the yeast and the bacteria are going
to eat the sugar they're going to feed on this sugar so you want to put that in
there and just give it a stir or give it a shake you don't have to be too crazy
with the shake now I've got this lid on and it's just sort of on but you can see
it's wobbly you don't want to tighten the lid down because this is going to
start producing carbon dioxide and you want that carbon dioxide to escape if it
can't escape the pressure builds up and you could have a bottle bomb on your
hands the other thing is if the pressure builds up to a certain point the yeast
slow down and they stop working and you don't want that to happen either so this
is going to sit on the counter back here until tomorrow when we move on to the
next step so on day two it's looking pretty cloudy which is excellent and it
smells smells really gingery with just a faint wisp of yeast so now we need to
feed it again so the same amount of sugar and yeast on
days two three four and five that you added on day one into the same amount of
water you don't add any more water at this point and a lot of people are going
to ask because I see the questions all the time why not just put all of the
ginger and all of the sugar in at the beginning and just let it sit for five
days which you know is a great question the answer to that is we're trying to
build a yeast colony so there's a very little bit of yeast on the outside of
the ginger but in order to build a really vibrant community of yeast and
other bacteria you need to slowly ramp it up and as much as yeast eat sugar and
they need sugar to live and to grow too much sugar all at once at the very
beginning will actually slow the whole process down
you're not going to kill the yeast but they're not gonna be healthy it's kind
of like you've eaten Thanksgiving dinner and you don't want to get up off the
couch to do the dishes same sort of thing over feed the yeast
they're gonna get sluggish they're not going to multiply quite as quickly and
the whole process is going to get slowed down so you want to stir this really
well I would suggest shaking it a couple times between feedings even usually oh
here's my stir stick I use a stir plate usually in this process you don't want
to add too much oxygen but in these beginning stages oxygen is
your friend so you want to get oxygen into the liquid and you want to release
the carbon dioxide you also want to keep the yeast in suspension so stir it or
shake it if you homebrew you'll probably have a magnetism mixer like I have or
stir plate use the stir plate definitely use the stir plate the stir plate is
going to keep the eastern suspension it's going to release the carbon dioxide
and it's going to add oxygen to the liquid and those three things will help
you grow a yeast colony much faster so just follow those instructions and I'll
see you in another three or four days three or four days later what you have
is ginger bug and as you can see there's bubbles working here there's yeast it's
creating co2 it's also creating alcohol and you've got the perfect yeast starter
culture for making naturally fermented naturally carbonated ginger beer and
it's really easy to take care of this stuff you're probably going to use
somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 of this in a batch of ginger beer and we're also
going to use it in a whole bunch of other things as well a lot of different
naturally fermented sodas so you're going to use half the two-thirds of this
you're going to top it back up to water to about the same level
throw in a tablespoon or two of sugar maybe chop up a little bit more ginger
and throw that in as well and then you can keep it in the fridge and if you
keep it in the fridge you only have to feed it once a week and a feeding is
that process of draining off the water topping it back up putting in a little
bit more sugar giving the stir and putting it back in
the fridge and what you use that liquid for can vary a lot and we're gonna use
it in a lot of different places so yeah Oh any of the beer brewers out there who
have tasted their yeast starter and said oh it's awful exact same effect this is
going to taste bad but the end result is going to taste great you can really
taste the sort of sourness there's a lot of alcohol in there so there's the yeast
which is mostly sacra myiasis probably wild beer yeast there's probably some
lactobacillus in there adding to the sourness but no one really knows until
you give this to a microbiologist and they test it and then they can tell you
what's inside and what's inside mine is going to be different than what's inside
yours and inside someone else's all of that comes down to what was on your
ginger when you bought it what's in the air in your kitchen and what's on your
sugar that you put in all of those things are going to change the makeup of
the biome of this ginger beer so now that we've got this come on back and
we'll make our first batch of ginger beer with it and we'll also see what
other great things we can put this in thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you