Ginger Beer 

Lately my cocktail of choice has been a Mamie Taylor. In conjunction with this, I’ve been seeking out my favorite non-alcoholic ginger ale to make it with. Sadly, my favorites contain HFCS, which I try to avoid. Thanks to inspiration from friends, I decided to try making it myself. Here’s my latest try.

Get yourself one or two 2-liter bottles. The plastic ones that contain your favorite HFCS flavor work the best. Wash them out really well. You’ll also need a strainer, a funnel, a grater and some measuring cups.

Scrape the skin off of a large knob of fresh ginger. Grate the ginger on your box grater with the coarsest (largest) side. You’ll need about 3oz of ginger per batch. Go ahead and use the stringy bits that are left behind while you’re grating. 3 oz of grated ginger is about 1/3 of a packed cup, if you don’t have a scale. (If you don’t own a scale, BUY ONE).

Take 2/3rds of this grated ginger and put it in a small saucepan with 1/2 cup of water and 6oz of sugar. (6oz of sugar is about 3/4ths of a cup) Put this over medium heat and stir until the sugar is disolved. When you start to see some bubbles, take this off of the heat and cover. Let seep for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, stir in the rest of your grated ginger. Cover and let sit another 30 minutes.

While your syrup is soaking up ginger, fully juice one lemon. This should give you about 1/4 cup of juice. You’ll only need two tablespoons of lemon juice so you should have made two batches.

Ginger Beer
For me, this works best with a 4-cup and a 2-cup measure. I put my strainer over the 4-cup measure and use the 2-cup measure to pour water. First I dump my ginger syrup into the strainer. I pour 2 cups of cold water into the pan to rinse it out and also pour this water over the strained ginger. At this point I pour two more cups of cold water into my measuring cup and whisk in 1/8 teaspoon active dry yeast. I let this yeast sit to dissolve a little into the water. While it is dissolving I spend 5 minutes pressing the ginger bits with a spoon, getting out every bit of juice.

Using a funnel, pour the ginger syrup into the plastic 2-liter bottle. Give the 2-cup yeast & water mixture a quick whisk and pour into the funnel after it. Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and 3 more cups of water. I usually mix the lemon juice into the water first, but it doesn’t really matter. This means you’ve put in 7 cups of water, total. Oh, and the 1/2 cup that made the syrup.

Cap off the bottle and give it a good shake to mix it up. Put this bottle at room temperature for 2 days or so. You’ll want to give it a slight shake every day and check it for stiffness. Also, keep this bottle in another container, just in case it springs a leak. If you try to squeeze the bottle and it has absolutely no give, you probably want to put it in the fridge. Depending on the temperature this could happen in a matter of 24 hours, but most likely it will take 48. Recently during really warm weather the yeasts got really crazy and my ginger ale tasted more like funky yeast than ginger.

This ginger beer needs to be refrigerated before you can open the bottle. Carbon dioxide will only stay suspended in cold liquid, so any attempt to open this while warm will make a fizzy mess and give you flat ginger ale. As it is, you’ll need to crack this open slowly to release the pressure. Once it is cold, make sure you open it once a day, just to release the pressure that will still be building up.

This recipe mostly stolen from Alton Brown [ Food Network: Alton Brown Ginger Ale ]