Four 500ml bottles of ginger beer made and one drunk. It was definitely gingery and also kind of beery. Certainly interesting. I put the bottles in the fridge to chill a day or so apart as the longer they sit at room temperature the more the bacteria consumes the sugar and the more sour the drink becomes, so I wanted to test how different this could be.
While reducing our cupboard stocks during the Covid lockdown, we found an old (and quite out of date) ginger beer making kit which required a 2 litre plastic bottle. We’d been keeping one for exactly this purpose and now we had no other reason not to do it. So my husband mixed up the spice, the yeast and water, let it brew at room temperature for three days and then bottled it in plastic. It’s not showing much sign of activity yet but I’m turning it over every day in hope that moving the sediment through the liquid will encourage some degree of fermentation to take place.
Having recently made a fruit cake, for which we only needed half a tin of pineapple (let me know if you want the recipe), I decided to have another attempt at fruit kvass, using the tinned pineapple, and the last of a bag of frozen pineapple we found at the bottom of the freezer. (One good thing about lockdown, we are finally using up the “lurkers” from the back of the pantry and the bottom of the freezer.)
I put together three jars to see which combination produced the best effect – all tinned, all frozen, and half-half. The first batch I put together with fruit and organic sugar, but as I only had enough naturalised water to fill up the jars halfway, I used demerara sugar when I topped the jars up a few days later. They are all bubbling and showing signs of fermenting which is good.
Tales from Tobhamhor 