Leading nicely to the Ginger Beer Plant...

• Ginger Beer Recipe
• To begin with remove the fabric cover and elastic band and sterilise your kilner jar.Once thoroughly clean, pour into the jar ¾ pint warm (cooled boiled) water, then add 2tsps sugar, 2tsps ground ginger, and 1 tsp of yeast. Bread yeast or wine yeast whichever you can get.Leave for 3 days.Feed with 1 tsp dried ginger and 1 tsp sugar every day for one week.Then strain into a 5 litre bucket using a FINE filter bag for clear ginger beer or COARSE filter bag for cloudy ginger beer. The cloudy ginger beer will continue to ferment more than the clear so be warned it may be more alcoholic, and more prone to exploding if using glass bottles (but 2litre plastic bottles are ALWAYS recommended).Add 700g of sugar, 2 pints of warm water (cooled boiled water) and the juice of 2 freshly squeezed lemons.Then add 5 pints of cold water mix together well and pour into 2 sterilised 2 litre plastic drinks bottles. You might have enough left to fill some smaller bottles too.Traditionally the ‘yeast plant’ (strained residue) is then split into two, one half is put back into your jar with ¾ pint warm water, 2 tsps sugar, 2 tsps of dried ginger and the whole process starts again.The other half should be given to a friend, but if a coarse filter bag is used you might find that you need to reuse the whole residue yourself. Your ginger beer will be ready in two weeks time (if you can wait that long!) store somewhere cool and dark in the meantime.