Ginger Beer
One and a half ounce best ground Jamaica ginger, one and a half ounce cream of tartar, one pound brown sugar, two sliced lemons, four quarts boiling water, one-half pint yeast. Let it ferment twenty-four hours. In two weeks it will be ready for use.--Mrs. G. W. P.
A small-batch fermented ginger beer of the old household type: sugar, spice, acid and yeast, left to work in a crock and then bottled. The proportions are sound, but two things need translating — the yeast and the pressure.
- Half a pint of yeastThis means a cup of liquid barm or brewer's yeast slurry from an active batch, not packaged dry yeast. A scant 1/4 teaspoon of active dry or ale yeast in four quarts of liquid does the same work; a full cup of modern yeast would give a muddy, bready drink.
- Jamaica gingerDried ground rhizome of Zingiber officinale, the same spice sold today, though ground ginger of the period may often have been staler and weaker than modern powder. An ounce and a half of fresh, sharp modern powder is assertive; part of it can be swapped for grated fresh ginger and strained.
- Cream of tartarPotassium bitartrate, still on the spice shelf. It acidifies the wort, discourages spoilage organisms and keeps the sugar inverting — it is not a leavener here.
- Temperature of the waterFour quarts boiling water dissolves the sugar and scalds the lemons, but the yeast goes in only after the mixture has cooled to blood heat or below. Pitched hot, the yeast dies and nothing ferments.
- The twenty-four hoursPresumably the first vigorous ferment; the recipe does not say what vessel or covering to use. Straining off the lemon slices and sediment before the mixture is put away is a sensible precaution, since long contact with the pith can turn the drink bitter.
- Bottle pressureThe recipe does not say to bottle it, but if the remaining two weeks are spent in sealed glass, that is where the carbonation comes from, and a sugar-rich ferment sealed in glass builds real pressure. Use swing-top bottles or plastic soda bottles, keep them cool, and release the gas daily — squeeze a plastic bottle to judge when it is charged, then refrigerate to slow the yeast.
- AlcoholGinger beer of this kind is usually low in alcohol, on the order of one or two percent if put away while still sweet, but a pound of sugar in four quarts can carry it considerably higher if the ferment is left long and warm. It is not a soft drink in the modern sense.
- YieldAbout a gallon, enough for eight to ten swing-top pint bottles. It is at its best within a month; after that it dries out and grows sour.
Ginger beer belongs to the family of small home-fermented drinks — spruce beer, molasses beer, root beer — that many Southern households kept going through hot weather, when, by an account often repeated, water was suspect and a mildly acidic, mildly alcoholic drink was safer and more welcome. "Jamaica ginger" was a trade grade name, the West Indian ginger held to be the finest and strongest, and it shows up in nineteenth-century kitchens and pharmacies alike; the alcoholic ginger extract sold by druggists under that name later became notorious during Prohibition. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of these initialed recipes — Mrs. G. W. P. is giving her own working proportions rather than a printed formula, and the instructions assume the reader already knows what a crock of barm looks like and when to bottle.