🇬🇧 How to Make Ginger Beer

Craving Ginger Beer? On FoodNeverComes the food never actually comes — so here's how to make real Ginger Beer at home, in about 30 min + 2 days, with stuff you probably already have.

🛒 Ingredients

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• 150g fresh ginger, unpeeled and grated
• 200g caster sugar
• juice of 2 lemons
• 1.5 litres water
• ¼ tsp active dried yeast (for the fermented version)
• or 1 litre carbonated water (for the quick version)

👩‍🍳 Method

1. Grate the ginger with the skin on. A lot of the heat sits just under it, and peeling costs you the bite that makes this worth drinking.
2. Simmer the ginger with the sugar and 500ml of the water for 10 minutes to make a strong syrup, then cool it completely and strain.
3. For the quick version, stop here: mix the syrup with lemon juice and top with cold carbonated water to taste. Ready immediately.
4. For the fermented version, combine the syrup, lemon juice and remaining water, add the yeast, and bottle in plastic — never glass — leaving headroom.
5. Leave at room temperature 24–48 hours, opening a bottle daily to check the pressure. This is genuinely important: a forgotten fermenting bottle builds enough pressure to burst, which is why plastic and daily checks are non-negotiable.
6. Refrigerate once it is lively to halt the ferment, and drink within a week. It stays under 0.5% alcohol at this timing — this is the soft drink, not the alcoholic ginger beer.