Home-brewed ginger beer is a naturally fermented carbonated drink flavored with ginger. Many people who make ginger beer at home realized that it was a probiotic drink that could support gastrointestinal health. If you’re a fan of kombucha, you’ll love this fizzy, refreshing ginger beer made from kefir grains. Kefir is a mixture of bacteria and yeasts that naturally takes the form of white grains.
You can buy kefir grains online or search for them at your local health food store. Once you have them in your hand, it’s easy to make a probiotic, lemonade drink yourself that can supplement your body’s natural population of disease-fighting bacteria, improve your immune system, and even fight pain. Generations of Turkish shepherds swear by it, but the traditional kefir recipe is more like a thin, sour yogurt. It’s delicious too, but this water kefir drink is light, bubbly and refreshingly quaffable.
The authentic version of ginger beer is a two-step process involving a ginger bug, a collection of beneficial bacteria and yeasts. The resulting drink is rich in probiotics, which, when consumed as part of a regular diet, promote a healthy digestive system. As with kefir grains and kombucha mushrooms, the ginger beer plant can cultivate almost anything. Most people use it to make a (mostly) non-alcoholic ginger beer.
There is a counterfeit version called a ginger bug, but the ginger bug generally only involves growing a few wild yeasts. I’m sure they ferment things well, but they’re not the authentic ginger beer plant culture. Authentic ginger beer has a very low alcohol content, probably below 1 percent. Cool it down immediately – You can set a freezer’s thermostat to 0°C, which will keep your ginger beer stalled for a long time.
That way, the added ingredients are usually what you taste first when you drink the ginger beer, with the spicy ginger coming through in the finish. The fact that ginger beer already contains a great sweet and spicy flavor provides a wonderful canvas to incorporate other sweet, sour, tart or creamy flavors. I’m learning about ginger beer for the first time and its amazing abilities for a better life and better health. By the way — a mixture similar to kefir, the ginger beer plant exists and is the traditional probiotic for authentic ginger beer.
In its simplest form, ginger beer can be made with either fresh or dried ginger, sugar and lemon juice. The ginger beer is ready when the substance becomes bubbly when stirred (similar to when preparing the ginger appetizer). In the paragraph on how to make the beetle, 2 tbsp of each sugar and ginger day one, and then one tbsp each the following day for feeding. The ginger root contains an active ingredient called gingerol, a natural oil that is rich in minerals such as magnesium, manganese, potassium, copper and vitamin B6. Pour into clean bottles, leaving at least 5 cm between the ginger beer and the top of the bottle.
Ginger beer plants are more difficult to obtain than kefir grains or kombucha mushrooms, but they are available. Homemade ginger beer is also a great base for the perfect Moscow Mule cocktail, served ice cold in classic copper cups. Probiotics are alive and require a certain amount of carbohydrates to survive and reproduce, which is why more sugar is added in addition to fruits for secondary fermentation.