Ginger Bounty Part Two: the bug

Ming Wei grating ginger 

            Making homemade soda is exciting. Period. It’s a novelty to be able to make your own carbonated beverage! Kudos SodaStream.

But even more exciting than shooting CO2 into a flavored liquid is creating a culture of living microscopic organisms and bacteria that carbonate a beverage for you. Sound gross? These tiny communities are necessary for making beer, wine, bread, cheese and so many other foods and drinks we enjoy. Besides the most familiar source to most Americans – a packet or ‘dry active’ yeast – there are countless other forms in which these cultures can be found.

Which leads me to the first step for making ginger beer: starting a ‘ginger bug’. An active bug is necessary to achieve the optimal, fizzy beverage. To make the bug, add two teaspoons of sugar and two teaspoons of grated fresh ginger into a cup of water and mix well. The container (I used a jar) should be left in a warm place and covered with something breathable - to keep bugs and other debris out while letting air in. We used cloth-napkin/hair-tie configuration.

Feed the ginger bug a teaspoon each of sugar and grated ginger every day and stir vigorously. The natural yeast in the ginger will feed on the sugar and produce CO2. It should take anywhere from two to seven days for the bug to become active, depending on the freshness of your ginger (fresher=less time) and climate (warmer=less time). When small bubbles form on the surface and begin to collect into a layer about the thickness of a dime, the bug is ready. Here in Hawaii, our bug sits in a sunny windowsill and the ginger is no more than a week out of the soil before being grated into the jar – it’s ready in about a day.

Bubbles in the turmeric bug!

We’ve experimented with turmeric and galangal (a root similar to ginger, used in southeast Asian cooking) bugs, and it is apparent that each root has slightly different yeast contents. The turmeric will start bubbling overnight, while the galangal takes close to four days. [We have yet to taste the soda made with these bugs – these batches still need another week to ferment]

If you don’t plan to make the ginger beer right away, you can keep the bug around, feeding it every other day, for about a week. It starts to become like a pet…and it’s so fun to peek under the cloth napkin and check for bubbles.

Note: These instructions were inspired by Sandor Katz’s amazing book, ‘Wild Fermentation’ which we used as our guide through the process.