A simple recipe for making ginger beer. To illustrate how simple, we made it at work yesterday using stuff from Woolies. You’ll need a 2L container, a mixing bowl and access to hot water.

Ingredients are brown sugar (500g), powdered ginger, tartaric acid, cream of tartar, lemon juice, lime juice and bread yeast. Erm, we were really rough with our estimates, so not sure if we’ve done the right proportions of everything. I spose if you like your brew a certain way, you’ll want to experiment anyway. So here’s what we did for ours.

Half a teaspoon of the tartaric acid, quarter a teaspoon of the cream of tartar, four teaspoons of powdered ginger. Then the 500g of brown sugar, which conveniently comes in 500g bags!

Add a teaspoon each of lime and lemon juices, then about 1.75L of hot water. Give it a good stir, then leave for a couple hours to cool. It doesn’t have to get cold – cooling is more so you don’t kill the yeast when you eventually add that in.

Once the mix reaches a slightly less than warm temperature, stir in 1 teaspoon of yeast, and chuck the lot into your airtight jug. We got a jug with a valve, so we could easily let air out if it built up too much. The yeast metabolises the sugars and turns this sweet brown stuff into sweet ginger beery stuff, producing carbon dioxide in the process, which carbonates the drink.

We’ve left the valve open over the public holiday in case the yeast got crazy while we weren’t there. Tomorrow, we close the valve and leave it all sealed until Friday afternoon to let the drink go fizzy.

Later update: We opened it that Friday. The fizz was very mild, the taste was great, but the mouthfeel was a bit thick. Still, not bad for a first attempt in a corporate desk environment.