Home › Beverages › Ginger Beer
Ginger Beer
Ginger beer is also an excellent summer beverage. It is easy to make, as it contains no materials except those found in the closet or the druggist's shops. Boil eleven ounces of ginger root, or ordinary ginger, tied in a bag for half an hour, in a gallon of water, with the yellow peel of two lemons. Then add six gallons more of water, ten pounds of sugar, the juice of four lemons, half a pound of honey and three pints of yeast. Strain it when cold, add the white of one egg well beaten and let the beer stand for four days. Then bottle it.
This makes seven gallons of a genuinely alcoholic, actively fermenting beer, not a soft drink. Scale it down and think about bottle pressure before anything else.
- Bottle pressure is the hingeFour days of fermentation on ten pounds of sugar leaves the yeast nowhere near finished, and sealing that into glass builds pressure fast. Ferment until the sugar is genuinely spent, prime with a measured small dose of sugar, and use PET bottles or heavy swing-tops kept cold; period recipes assumed thick stoneware bottles and cellars, and they still burst.
- YieldSeven gallons in total. Dividing everything by seven gives a workable single gallon: about 1.5 oz ginger, a scant 1.5 lb sugar, about an ounce of honey, the peel of a third of a lemon and the juice of half a lemon.
- This is beer, not ginger aleRoughly 1.4 lb of sugar per gallon, which if it fermented out fully would put the drink well above ordinary beer strength. Nineteenth-century "small" ginger beers were much weaker; if you want the mild drink of the name, cut the sugar sharply.
- "Three pints of yeast"That means liquid barm skimmed off a working brew or a baker's wet ferment, not anything sold today. A half teaspoon of dry ale or champagne yeast per gallon does the same work.
- "Ginger root, or ordinary ginger"The druggist sold dried whole ginger and ground ginger; both were pantry goods, which is the point of the reference to the closet and the shop. Dried ginger gives the sharp, resinous bite this recipe is after. Fresh rhizome works but is much milder and needs several times the weight.
- The bagTie the ginger loosely in muslin so it can swell, and bruise it first. Powdered ginger will slip through cheesecloth; use a doubled layer or accept a sediment.
- The egg whiteBeaten egg white was a fining agent, meant to coagulate and drag haze down with it. It is left raw in the liquid here; skip it and let the beer clear on its own in the cold, or use gelatine finings.
- Temperature and timingCool the wort fully before pitching yeast, then ferment around 65-70F. Four days is a guide, not an endpoint; use a hydrometer or wait for the airlock to go quiet.
Ginger beer is generally traced to mid-eighteenth-century England, where it was brewed at home and sold by the bottle long before carbonated soft drinks existed; the traditional versions relied either on brewer's barm, as here, or on the "ginger beer plant," a gelatinous culture of yeast and bacteria passed hand to hand between households. Its inclusion in a household book alongside lemonades and shrubs reflects a period when a lightly alcoholic summer beverage still counted as a temperate domestic drink rather than liquor, and when ginger itself was a dependable pantry staple bought dried from the druggist rather than fresh from a grocer. The heavy sugar and the reliance on lemon peel and honey for flavour mark it as a recipe in which the fizz had to come from the yeast and the bottle.