Soy Sauce Fermented Ginger Beer

For this recipe we're drafting in some old comrades of the two ingredients that have centruries of history between them; Lime, Chilli & Sugar.

For the starter we'll be using a ginger bug, made from scratch. You could also use some fermented pickle juice if you wanted, as drinks tend to be less volatile with pickle juice as a starter.

The ginger bug is of course made by adding ginger and sugar to water continuously over a couple of days till it starts to bubble.

Ingredients & Equipment:

• Fresh Ginger
• Sugar (Raw Cane Sugar if possible)
• Water - Filtered if possible as to avoid chemicals in the water
• Kilner Jar or alternative jar that can be sealed airtight
• Grater
• Soy Sauce - I'm using Tamari, but you can use any light variety really.
• Chilli
• Lime

Recipe

Ingredients to make 1 litre of soda:

• 10g Ginger Bug (strained)
• 60g Fresh Ginger
• 50g Sugar
• 10g Lime Juice
• 8g Soy Sauce
• 775g water (filtered water)
• 1g Scotch Bonnet Chilli

To make this we're going to take our water and add it to our sterilised kilner jar (or similar) and we're going to grate in our Ginger, chop in some chilli, squeeze some lime, add a drop of our Soy Sauce & a splash of the ginger bug.

We're then going to leave it to ferment for around 2 days at ambient temperature, ideally between 12°c & 16°c or until we see it bubbling & foaming.

Once it's there, strain it and transfer it to a sterilised bottle or bottles of your choice. I usually then leave it out at room temperature for another 6-24 hours to build the pressure in the bottle (secondary fermentation). Once when you open it and gives a satisfying pop, then move it to the fridge and it should keep for a month or 2 before it starts to get too fizzy.

There you have it, Umami Ginger Beer!