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Ginger Beer
1247. Put into a large pan two pounds of loaf sugar, two ounces of bruised ginger, and two gallons of cold water. Boil the whole for half an hour, skimming it well; then pour out into a large earthenware jar, adding a lemon sliced, and half an ounce of cream of tartar. Let it cool to new milk heat, then add a tea-cupful of yeast, and allow it to ferment for two days; strain it, and bottle in small stone bottles, with the corks firmly tied down.
A straightforward small-beer formula: sweet ginger wort, a short open fermentation, then bottling while sugar remains. The whole thing hinges on how you handle the bottles.
- Bottle pressure is the real hazardBottling after only two days leaves plenty of unfermented sugar, and the yeast keeps working in the sealed bottle. The corks in the original were tied down to stop them being forced out. Use plastic PET bottles, keep them refrigerated after a day or two at room temperature, and release the pressure daily.
- "New milk heat"Milk fresh from the cow, i.e. roughly blood heat, about 90-98F. Cool the liquid to that point before pitching yeast; much hotter will kill it.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, 2 lb to the 2 gallons.
- A tea-cupful of yeastThis means liquid barm skimmed from a working ale or a bread ferment, mostly water by volume. Substitute about a teaspoon of dried ale or bread yeast, or a sachet of dry brewing yeast.
- Bruised gingerWhole dried ginger root, cracked with a rolling pin or the flat of a knife to open the fibres. Two ounces is assertive but not fierce. Fresh ginger will work but is milder by weight and gives a greener, less resinous flavour.
- Cream of tartarStill sold as such. Half an ounce is about 1.5 tablespoons; it acidifies the wort, which helps the yeast and discourages spoilage bacteria.
- Boiling and skimmingHalf an hour at a boil will drive off a fair amount of water and lift a grey scum from the sugar and ginger. Skim it off and top back up to two gallons with boiled water before cooling if you want the intended strength.
- Yield and keepingAbout two gallons, roughly sixteen pint bottles. Drink within a couple of weeks; there is no pasteurisation step, so it will keep drying out and gaining fizz.
- AlcoholThis is a genuinely alcoholic drink rather than a soft drink. The sugar present allows perhaps a couple of per cent by the time it is bottled, rising as fermentation continues in the bottle. Chilling slows fermentation but does not stop it.
Ginger beer belongs to the British family of "small beers" — lightly fermented, quickly drunk household brews made in the kitchen rather than the brewhouse, alongside nettle beer, treacle beer and spruce beer. Ginger itself had been a staple of the British spice trade for centuries, and by the nineteenth century it was cheap enough that a cook could use two ounces without a second thought. The stone bottles the recipe calls for are the salt-glazed stoneware ginger beer bottles that survive by the thousand in Victorian rubbish tips; they were used because they held pressure and kept the contents cool and dark. The instruction to tie the corks down is the tell that this is a live, still-fermenting drink — commercial makers later solved the same problem with the internal screw stopper and the glass-marble Codd bottle, and eventually with force-carbonated, yeast-free ginger ale.