Homemade & Commercial » Ginger Beer http://www.thebeerpirate.com Alcoholic beverages; commonly beer and wines and made at home. Most often brews are made from brewing kits purchased at shops specialized in spirits. Cheap Draft features homebrew recipes, equipment requirements, and best practices needed to deliver the perfect batch! Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:11:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 Ginger Beer http://www.thebeerpirate.com/2008/03/ginger-beer/ http://www.thebeerpirate.com/2008/03/ginger-beer/#comments Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:31:55 +0000 admin http://www.cheapdraft.com/2008/03/22/ginger-beer/ Ginger Beer Some years ago in the National Press there appeared a recipe for ginger beer made up by means of starting off a ‘ginger beer plant’. Unfortunately, and quite by accident, my name became mixed up with it and I was inundated with requests for details for weeks afterwards. The general direction – not mine, of course – was to put a couple of ounces of yeast in a cup with warm water and some ginger until it began to ferment, or rather erupt like a volcano which it invariably did, spreading its yeasty lava over everything. The direction went on to explain that half of this was then made up to one gallon with sugar and water and the other half given away. This part of it seemed to be a sinister secret; if you did not give half away the rest would die – it would, naturally through lack of sugar or other yeast food. There still persists a rumor that this makes a drinkable drink – it doesn’t.

My reason for writing about it here is that the appearance of this book is certain to revive in the memory of many readers what was known to them in their early days as: Californian Bees, Beastly Beer Organism, Bee Wine, Bee Wine Organism, or Ginger Beer Plant. And I want to forestall anyone hoping to start this off all over again in order to save them endless trouble and disappointment.

Oh, I don’t doubt that forty and more years ago the ‘drink’ made from this stuff was acceptable; so was home made soap and boot polish and knee-high lace-up boots for teenagers.

You may recall, many of you, those bottles of cloudy liquid with some sort of sludge deposit in the bottom arrayed along a window sill that got plenty of sunshine to keep the liquid warm – sunshine, incidentally is another relic of the past, but I cannot concern myself with that here. In these bottles was a ‘mysterious’ substance rising and falling and by some stretch of the imagination giving the impression of bees buzzing about – hence Bee Wine. The same – or a similar effect – is often seen in jars of fermenting wine during the vigorous fermentation stage and when the jar is moved. Clumps of yeast rise to the surface and fall back again and because they have become dislodged, the gas rising carries them up to the top, where the weight of the lumps forces them down again.

But the yeast employed in Bee Wine or the Ginger Beer Plant is a type which forms tapioca-like clumps. There are other sorts which science describes as associations of yeast and bacteria to give a consortium with a possible symbiotic association between its components. In other words, a balanced complex mixture of yeast and bacteria. My advice to anyone thinking of reviving this, if only for the sake of novelty, is to forget it.

‘With modern methods of making wines where top class results are assured and with home brewing taking hold again, also with success assured, surely there is no need to go chasing dreams of a forgotten age – especially since the dreams are likely to turn out as nightmares.

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