Ginger Beer Trick

The Wife has entered me in the Masterchef thingy. Which is cool, despite me despising reality TV in general and having watched about 20 minutes of Masterchef this year in particular. The chance to accelerate my learning in the kitchen and get exposure for the possible commercial future of Lantanaland is not one to pass up for simple snobbery,

The Wife did all the entry forms and they questions they asked and the bit I did watch this year leads me to believe that I would struggle in one key area – accuracy. I mean that in presentation and in recipes that require minute accuracy and attention to detail I just fall over. This is why the beer brewing kit that The Wife bought me has sat there unused for four years, because beer requires accuracy and attention to detail to be any good. It is just chemistry.

This early summer weather though has wakened a desire from the last year of high school. No I’m not chasing anything that moves in a short skirt and knee high socks, but if The Wife wants to dress that way I won’t complain. In the last year of school my mate Motts and I brewed the most fantastic ginger beer you will have ever tasted.

We used the traditional bug method, which as I found works off a different bacteria than a yeast based brew, using lactobacillus cultured from leaving some fruit free of pesticides in water out in the sun for a few days. You then add sugar and ginger every day for a week to create the liquid gold for your flavour base. When we made it in high school we loved experimenting. More lemon, less sugar, opening the bottles half way through brewing and adding a shot of rum, we tried it all. Of course we had the explosions that anyone who brews ginger beer experiences. The last bottle that we left behind was opened by Motts dad, it exploded across the yard behind the bottle top and in true loony tunes fashion he tipped the bottle upside down and a single drop came out. I shudder to think what might have happened to Gladstone’s best surgeon if the bottle had succumbed to the pressure before he knocked the top off.

In keeping to form though, I am going to replace the sugar in the recipe with Lantanaland Gold honey, and will balance that with limes instead of lemons. There is nothing better than a mildly alcoholic ginger beer on a hot day and this bloke even has a few tricks for getting round the exploding bottle problem. Read his tips here and I’ll report back with the results!