Food and Drink

Yesterday was the first 70 degree (21 Celsius) day of the year in Seattle, which as far as I’m concerned is the official start of barbeque season. After a good cleaning, the barbeque was loaded with charcoal and then a “Leaping Frog” Chicken, by far the best recipe I ever got from the now defunct Gourmet magazine.

Some neighbors a few houses away were having a mini drum circle and the sound of djembe drums added humorously to the ritual.

After a week of fermentation and living mostly in the bathtub (precaution in case one of the bottles exploded…), the bottles have been moved out to our shed and are now resting upside down at around 50 degrees F (10 C). The plan currently is to try the “disgorgement” method to remove the sediment after a week or so.

After that frustrating day of working on closing the uppers for the Wholecuts I thought it was time to make a batch of ginger beer!

I’ve made ginger beer before but this time around, I thought I’d do it with a little more attention to my brewing method, such as keeping better track of the amounts of ingredients, which is really the whole purpose of this blog post.

So here’s a photo of the raw ingredients, minus sugar and cream of tartar.

The basic recipe that I’m using is from a Trinidad & Tobago cookbook I have, with a few changes that I’ve made over time.

The first step, and the most amount of actual work involved, is to peel and grate 1 lb of ginger. Here’s an exciting action shot! You should probably take a piece of raw ginger and shove it in your nose for full effect.

Next step is to zest a lemon, and cut up the pineapple to eat later, saving the core and adding that to the bowl of grated ginger.

Next, bring 8 quarts of water (I only used 7 liters this time and ended up short) to a boil and while waiting for that, make a cocktail from the juice of the left over lemon.

Once the water is boiling, take it off the heat, add 1 1/2 tablespoons of cream of tartar and the ginger, lemon zest, and pineapple bits and then let the mixture stand overnight.

The next day, bring the mixture back up to a boil, added 5 cups of sugar, let the mixture cool down again to 109 F and then add champagne yeast (I used Lalvin EC-1118 Saccharomyces bayanus this time). Let stand for a few minutes and then bottle the mixture.

This time I’m using champagne bottles to make the end product a little more classy than the plastic soda bottles I’ve used in the past. I haven’t done this before and there’s a danger that some of the bottles might explode, but hopefully in two weeks I’ll have 9 (actually only 8 1/2 since I lost a bit while I was bottling, which is why 8 quarts of water) bottles of ginger beer, ready to use for making a great Dark ‘n’ Stormy!