Simple Ginger Beer

2026-07-24 || Tags: brewing recipe

Simple Ginger Beer

This is a fairly standard recipe I've seen floating around the internet if not fermenting using the natural yeast on the ginger. I've seen some recipes use bread yeast for this even. Haven't tried that but it would be interesting to do a side-by-side.

The recipe below makes about 4.5L of ginger beer. Change the amounts depending on how much you want to brew.

Equipment

Standard demijohn brewing stuff:

• ~5L fermenter with an airlock (I use a demijohn)
• enough swing top bottles for the amount of liquid you're brewing (~6 of mine)
• sterilizer (chemsan/starsan)
• syphon (optional)
• fridge big enough for your fermenter (optional)

Ingredients

• 400g grated/lightly-blended ginger
• 400g brown sugar
• juice of 6 limes (or ~150mL of lime juice)
• brewing yeast (I used Lalvin EC-1118, champagne yeast)
• some carbonation drops (one per bottle)

Most recipes I found used regular dark sugar. We had some "Extra Dark Brown Sugar" (or something like that), so I used that.

Steps

I don't mention the cleaning and sterilisation steps, but do make sure that anything your ginger beer touches (before or after fermentation) is cleaned and sterilised.

First Stage Fermentation

• Add ginger, sugar and a couple of liters of water to a pot and boil for 10 minutes
• Wait for this to cool down
• Strain out the ginger through a cheese cloth into your fermenter (or into another vessel then transfer that to the fermenter)
• Add lime juice and fill the fermenter up
• Add yeast and shake it up a bit to make sure it's not all clumped together
• Leave in a cool place

Secondary Stage Fermentation

• (Preferably) cold crash for 2 days
• Transfer your ginger beer to bottles (preferably using a syphon)
• Add carbonation drops
• Leave for 5ish days to ferment further
• Put in fridge and enjoy

Results

Turned out... pretty good. Not quite good enough to show my friends, but the wifey and I liked it.

Came out very nicely gingery, almost firey so, which we both love. Two main "features" which might (depending on your tastes and sensitivities) limit someone's enjoyment:

• Was a little bit too yeasty. If you poured it carefully, then there was no problem, but if there was some disturbance, or you just completely upended the bottle and drained everything out, then yeah, it was a bit much.
• A very surprising amount of residual sweetness/sugar. This must be unfermentable stuff from the molasses in the extra dark brown sugar I used. It wasn't a neccesarily bad flavour, just a bit unexpected and personally I am much more a fan of bone dry drinks.

It come out very lightly bubbly which was pleasant to the tongue (and not that it matters, but actually looked perfect), but I think it could've been a bit more.

I'll almost certainly make this again. Only things I'd change are to use less "extra dark" brown sugar and to try using 2 carbonation drops per bottle rather than 1.

Overall... 3.5/5. Good drinking. Cheap and easy to make. But nothing you'd bring around to show off your brewing skills.