Great recipe for a boat or a dirt home!
It is well known that alcohol is very expensive in French Polynesia, so it's not uncommon for people to stock up on liquor or beer before leaving Panama, where they are very inexpensive.
We weren't real keen on stocking up on vast sums of beer, because it's heavy and takes up a lot of room. But, full disclosure, we did buy 30 liters of rum, tequila, vodka and gin, transferring the ones that came in glass bottles into 3L bags (like those in wine-in-a-box). But I digress.
Fortunately, when we were hanging out in Panama, we became friends with the folks on Lile ፀ.
Lile ፀ's plan was to make their beverage of choice: ginger beer. We like ginger beer, probably more than most everyday national beers, so we were intrigued. I sat down with a LLM chat agent and together we crafted a recipe that works well on a boat. We make one gallon batches, it requires just a few pieces of equipment and the result is a slightly sweet, spicy ginger beer with about 6% ABV.
We start from real ginger and use a very specific strain of yeast (Voss Kveik) that we re-use from the sediment of the last batch, since getting brewer's yeast, let alone a specific strain, in French Polynesia is impossible.
We make this about once a month and will drink it straight or make a very potent Dark 'n Stormy. We have introduced quite a few other sailors to it and have always gotten positive feedback.
The Recipe
Below is a quick rundown of the process, but if you don't care about the details and background...
The Bonus Recipe
When you make the ginger beer, you end up with "spent" ginger which has been boiled for its gingery goodness. There is actually quite a bit of ginger flavor still left in this, so I again went to an AI agent and came up with a recipe to use this to make a ginger breakfast bread. It took a couple iterations to get the proportions of things right, but it is really good now and a great way to use every last bit of the ginger.
Cleanliness
The process is very similar to beer brewing - actually almost identical. Cleanliness is exceptionally important, especially because we want/need to re-use the trub at the bottom of the fermenter as our yeast for the next batch. We have a sugar rich environment (which the yeast eat and then produce alcohol and CO₂ as byproducts), so anything that gets into the process is likely to grow.
As a general rule of thumb, everything that touches the ginger beer from the boil on through the bottling must be sterile. A batch of Star San in a spray bottle is your friend!
The Boil
We first peel the ginger to remove as much of the skin/paper as can be reasonably done. This can be done with a peeler or the edge of a spoon. We start from frozen ginger and it makes the whole process easier. If you are not going to make the ginger bread, you really don't need to remove the skin.
Next we shred the ginger with a fine shredder directly into a medium-size stockpot. We add 1 liter (quart) of water and bring it to a gentle boil. With about 5 minutes left we add the sugar and the baker's yeast. The baker's yeast is added during the boil so that it can be broken down into its nutrients and provide those nutrients to our brewer's yeast during fermentation. Ginger does not have the nutrients that the grains used in beer would have, so a little baker's yeast does the trick.
We also boil about 4 liters (1 gallon) of additional water to sterilize it and immediately get it cooling down
The Fermentation
This unfermented, sugary liquid (which is called the wort) then needs to cool down to about 95℉ so it does not kill the Voss Kveik yeast.
We strain it into our one-gallon glass carboy fermenter, being careful to thoroughly spray our hands, the strainer and any other utensils with Star San sanitizer. Our strainer is now filled with the shredded ginger.
We return this to our medium stockpot and add sterilized water (also at or below 95℉), stir, and then pour through our strainer into the fermenter. We want to do this several times to get as much ginger flavor and sugar out of our ginger. In brewing terms, this is sparging. We do this maybe 2 or 3 times until the runoff runs clear.
Pitching the Yeast
Aeration
Waiting
Here you need to attach the bubbler or airlock to the top of your carboy. It is a liquid-based one-way valve that lets the CO₂ escape while the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol. This is an absolute must, as the pressure can increase to the level where it will shatter a glass container!
The airlock also serves as a way to monitor your fermentation. When the airlock bubbles once every ten seconds or less frequently, just about all of the sugar has been converted and it's time to bottle. You can also test the liquid for alco hol content using a hygrometer or sugar content using a digital brix refractometer. Given that Voss Kveik is an aggressive yeast, we have been able to get by with just noticing when the bubbling rate drops off quickly.
Bottling
Quick reminder, cleanliness and sanitizer!! Hands, strainers, tubing, spoons, etc., etc.!
We have found that 500ml soda bottles work GREAT! We end up with 7 of them from one batch. Thoroughly rinse them and then spray them liberally with sanitizer (caps too!) and then empty as much of the sanitizer as possible. Don't worry if some bubbles are left in or on anything ("Don't fear the bubbles", as Star San says, and we routinely say while making this because it's just fun to say.)
Racking
We need to transfer our ginger beer into a large sanitized stockpot (an Instant Pot with 1/4 cup of water and set to pressure cook for 0 minutes is a very easy way to go!) This is called racking in brewing terms. There are several ways to do this, but we want to disturb the trub on the bottom of the fermenter as little as possible. We use a (sterilized) 1/4"-vinyl hose that we hold just above the trub and allow it to siphon into our stockpot that we place in the sink.
To get the siphon going, fill the tube with sanitizer or sterilized water. Pinch one end of the tube and place the other into the fermenter, just above the trub. Two people really helps this process. Release the pinch until the darker ginger beer gets to the end of the tube, then pinch again. Put the tube into the stockpot and then release the tube.
Now, the trick is to keep the tube just above the trub so you don't suck up excess sediment from the bottom. You are going to get a little and that's okay. As you get to the bottom of the ginger beer, slowly tilt the jug to get as much beer as possible.
Adding the Priming Sugar
Now that we have the ginger beer in the stockpot, we need to add priming sugar. This is what will feed the yeast still present in our ginger beer to create CO₂ for carbonization within the bottles.
We also add a little extra sugar because we want a hint of sugar in our finished product. Voss Kveik is very aggressive and what you have now will be very, very dry.
Technically, you should make your sugar as a simple syrup that you boil to sterilize the sugar being added. Since this doesn't risk our trub, we have gotten away with not doing this. We take our sugar, stir it in with a sanitized spoon until it is fully dissolved.
Bottling
We are now ready to bottle! Empty any remaining sanitizer from the bottles and place them in your sink. We again use a hose to siphon the beer into the bottles. We have also done this with a funnel and pouring it, but prefer the siphon method. Again, prime the siphon using sterilized water or sanitizer.
Fill each bottle to about 1/2" from the top, then squeeze the bottle to bring the ginger beer close to the top of the mouth of the bottle and cap it. This limits the amount of oxygen in the bottle that could oxidize the ginger beer.
Continue this until you have filled all 7 bottles. If you are lucky, there will be a little bit extra that you can try now; it will just be flat and slightly sweeter than what you get at the end.
Waiting and Checking
Secondary fermentation, aka bottle fermenting, will take about 5 days. The bottles will start to become pressurized with CO₂ and you should check their pressure regularly (at least every twelve hours). You want the bottle to be very firm, just like a bottle of purchased soda.
Refrigerate
When they reach that level, refrigerate them, which will greatly slow - but not stop - the yeast activity.
Make sure you don't forget to check the bottles regularly. They will explode if left unchecked. Another good reason to use plastic bottles instead of glass!
Enjoy!
Once they are nice and cold, the best part begins, tasting the fruits of your labor!
You should first try it just over some ice, so you can really experience what you've created. It should be fizzy and spicy with just a hint of sweetness (of course you can adjust that) and will be at about 6% ABV, so about as boozy as a good beer.
We will often make an ass-kicking Dark 'n Stormy by using our ginger beer along with dark rum and a healthy dose of fresh lime juice.
Experimentation
We are engineers so I log all of our brewing results in our on-boat Wiki. I encourage you to make some notes as well and experiment with using white sugar, brown sugar, or natural sugar, adding lime juice, or not (although it should be fresh squeezed as the preservatives in bottled lime can impact the fermentation). You should also be able to easily make this at up to 9% alcohol without nay problem with this yeast strain by increasing the sugar in the boil, or make it will less alcohol by reducing the sugar.
I also keep a record of which generation of yeast (trub) used. We should be able to get up to 5 or 6 generations if we are very diligent with our cleaning process. Given that we get enough trub for two batches of ginger beer from one brew, the commercial yeast yields 2 batches. Those two batches provide enough trub to make four more batches (1st generation). Those 4 batches can produces 8 batches (2nd generation), which then produce 8 batches of third-generation batches, then 16 fourth-generation batches, etc, so if we are diligent, that packet of commercial yeast can last a long time!
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