Homemade Ginger Beer

Living in a hot climate has lots of benefits, many of them culinary.  Bread-making for example is a breeze!  Our non-air-conditioned kitchen is usually hovering about the 30-degree mark so you won't often find me in there slaving over a roast-beef dinner, but it's just about perfect for getting a good rise from yeasted dough.  I make at least 2 loaves a week meaning that we rarely, if ever, buy bread here.

Another thing for which the climate is perfect is brewing...  No, we don't have any 'real' beer on the go, but we have made Ginger Beer, and it's delicious.

I'm happy to go to great effort to make something delicious, but this requires barely any effort at all - it's ridiculously simple.

The recipe, plus photos of the process, can be found here, and many thanks to David Fankhauser who posted this.  I'd urge you to take careful note of his advice about the bottles you use - this very fizzy,  and we found ourselves releasing some fizz from the bottles several times a day as the plastic began to bulge.  I shudder to think of what might happen if you used glass bottles.

The only slight change I made to the recipe was to use half a cup of white sugar and half a cup of brown sugar, instead of the whole cup of white sugar listed.  I imagined this would give it a nicer flavour, but I don't know if it made any difference really.

I love the fact this uses ginger root as opposed to powdered ginger.  Ginger root is cheap and plentiful here and we always have peeled chunks of it in the freezer.  I sieved mine before I drank it, but Rob happily ate the bits of ginger too.  It's not too sweet, and so refreshing.

We made 2 litre bottles of this, but unfortunately our Amah tipped one of them away...  Granted, it did look a little sinister, but it's very annoying nonetheless!  Thank heavens the other bottle was in the fridge - and we'll just have to get another batch brewing very soon.