How to make homemade ginger beer

By Yotam and Niva Kay

Our first encounter with real homemade ginger beer was in a West African restaurant in Paris, France, in 2007. The richness of the drink blew us away. Since then, every so often we remember the richness and yumminess of home-made ginger beer and we're tempted to make another batch.

The recipe we use to make this drink uses a dedicated 'ginger bug'. It is a bit of a ritual to make the ginger bug, but it is very simple. The ginger bug is surprisingly versatile and can be used to introduce yeasts in other recipes for making drinks and bakes.

At some point in our ginger beer-making journey we asked ourselves, why not try making it with honey (our go-to sweetener) rather than sugar? Well, we did, and guess what? It tasted great! For the past few years we have made most of our ginger beer with honey, which is included in the recipe here, but you can use it interchangeably with sugar. We do use sugar when making the ginger bug.

We have also used ginger bugs to make beautiful loaves of bread instead of a sourdough starter. An active ginger bug is especially useful when there isn't an active sourdough starter available. When your ginger bug is going, try making a bread loaf. Use one of the loaf

recipes in the sourdough chapter of The Abundant Kitchen but substitute the sourdough starter

with an equivalent amount of strained ginger bug liquid.

We started using ginger bugs to ferment juices and other liquids a few years ago. Most of what we made was delicious and refreshing. These drinks can be an enticing gateway to get others to enjoy fermented drinks. While we have made some funky (and yummy) drinks by leaving the bug in for several weeks, a few days of fermenting juice produces a gently fermented soft drink.

Check out Yotam and Niva's recipe here.