Ginger beer

A recipe for any weather

Ginger beer reminds me of sitting on my porch in Florida, glass in hand, the spicy kick of the ginger beer slicing through the humid weather like a knife, waking me up from the trance I seem to fall into when faced with unrelenting heat.

I make my ginger beer strong, very strong: So cloudy it’s opaque, which means you’re unlikely to drink it by the gallon (though, you could).

It’s great on its own, or with rum or whiskey.

Making ginger beer, like any ferment, is part intuitive, part technique, and part sensory experience.

We weave together our sensory experience of the ferment, its bubbling, hissing, its changes in flavor, with our ever-growing intuition about how long to ferment or how much of an ingredient to add, which is rooted in continued practice.

Ginger beer is fermenting the way our ancestors ferment: The way I talk about often in Our Fermented Lives and in the Fermentation Oracle.

Here’s the recipe I’ve been making for almost 20 years, plus some new variations, with everything from flowers to tulsi to masala spices, which I haven’t shared before.