Ginger Beer Recipe: Brew It With a Ginger Bug or a Pinch of Yeast

The short answer: real ginger beer is fresh root ginger, lemon, sugar and water, fermented for a short time so the yeast makes carbon dioxide and only a little alcohol. You can start it two ways. A ginger bug is a starter you grow yourself from grated ginger, sugar and water over a few days. Or you add a pinch of dried yeast, and a 1 liter batch is fizzy in about three days. Either way, bottle it in plastic soda bottles, never glass, and move it to the fridge once it is carbonated.

Ginger beer is older than most soft drinks. Dean Madden of the National Centre for Biotechnology Education at the University of Reading, writing in Science in School (2008), traces it to England in the mid-1700s and notes that in 1935 there were more than 3,000 producers in the United Kingdom. Most modern ginger beer, he writes, is made with flavorings and carbonated with pressurized carbon dioxide. The brewed kind is what you make at home. It is a cousin of our ginger wine, which is fermented out and aged; ginger beer is stopped young, while it is still sweet and sparkling.

How to Make a Ginger Bug

A ginger bug is a small jar of sweetened ginger water left to ferment with whatever yeast and bacteria come in on the ginger. It works like a sourdough starter for drinks. A 2024 study in Food Chemistry by de Oliveira and colleagues, which followed ginger bugs and the ginger beer made from them, found that letting the bug activate for longer (96 hours) produced more organic acids and alcohols, more aroma compounds, and a larger population of lactic acid bacteria and yeasts. In plain terms, a bug that has had four days to get going has more life and more flavor to give.

Our starting method

1. Day 1. In a clean pint jar, mix 1 tablespoon of grated fresh ginger (skin on, if it is organic and scrubbed), 1 tablespoon of white sugar and 1 cup of unchlorinated water. Cover with a cloth held on by a rubber band, not a lid.
2. Days 2 to 5. Once a day, add another tablespoon of grated ginger and another tablespoon of sugar, and stir.
3. Ready. The bug is ready when it fizzes when stirred, has small bubbles rising on their own and smells sharp and gingery. At a warm room temperature that is usually somewhere between day 3 and day 7.

Water, sugar and warmth

Chlorinated tap water is meant to keep microbes down, which is the opposite of what a starter needs, so use filtered water, or tap water left to stand uncovered overnight. Plain white sugar is the simplest food for the bug. Keep the jar out of direct sun, somewhere around room temperature. Like any fermentation, a bug slows down in the cold, so a chilly kitchen can turn three days into a week.

When a bug has gone wrong

A white sediment at the bottom is normal. Fuzzy mold on the surface, in blue, green, black or pink, is not: throw the whole jar out and start again with a cleaner jar. The Science in School recipe relies on clean equipment and a large dose of yeast to outcompete contaminants; a bug has no such head start, so cleanliness matters even more.

Keeping it alive

Between batches, the bug can live in the fridge with a lid on, fed with a teaspoon each of ginger and sugar once a week. Before you use it again, bring it back to room temperature and feed it for a day or two until it is bubbly.

Ginger Beer With a Ginger Bug

Make the ginger base

For about 2 quarts, simmer 2 to 3 inches of grated or thinly sliced fresh ginger in 1 quart of water for 15 minutes, take it off the heat and stir in ½ to ¾ cup of sugar until it dissolves. Add another quart of cold water so the base cools faster, then the juice of a lemon. Strain out the ginger.

Add the bug only when it is cool

Heat kills the culture, so wait until the base is at room temperature. Strain in about ½ cup of liquid from the active bug, then top the bug jar back up with water, ginger and sugar so it keeps going.

Bottle and carbonate

Funnel the mix into clean PET soda bottles, leaving a few centimeters of air at the top, and cap them. Leave them at room temperature. Bug ferments are slower than yeast ferments and less predictable, so check them twice a day by squeezing a bottle: when it no longer gives under your thumb, the carbonation is there, and the bottles go straight into the fridge. That usually takes one to three days.

How Much Alcohol Is in Homemade Ginger Beer?

A little, by design

Any ginger beer that is brewed with yeast contains some alcohol, because that is what yeast makes from sugar alongside carbon dioxide. Madden notes that the British Excise Regulations of 1855 required ginger beer to contain no more than 2% alcohol, and that it was usually far less potent. For the home recipe above, he writes that the short fermentation period and refrigeration ensure that the alcohol content stays low. He also notes that some religious groups object even to drinks with little alcohol that are produced by brewing, which is worth knowing before you hand a glass to a guest.

Time is the dial

The longer ginger beer ferments, the more of its sugar becomes alcohol. The 2024 Food Chemistry study found exactly that: a longer fermentation of the ginger beer itself, 14 days, increased the ethanol along with the aroma and flavor compounds. Short and cold gives you a sweet, mildly alcoholic soft drink. Long and warm gives you something stronger, drier and, in a sealed bottle, under much more pressure.

Measure it if it matters

You cannot judge alcohol by taste. If you need to know, take a hydrometer reading of the base before the starter goes in and another when you bottle, and run both through our ABV calculator. Our hydrometer guide covers reading one in a sugary liquid.

Alcoholic Ginger Beer

Ferment it in a jug first

For a deliberately alcoholic ginger beer, do not try to get there by leaving sealed bottles out for longer. Ferment the sweetened ginger base in a jug or bucket under an airlock, with a wine or ale yeast, until the gravity drops as far as you want, the same way you would start a wine. Only then bottle it, either still or with a small measured dose of sugar for carbonation, following the bottling rules for beer or cider. Our guide on how to make hard cider covers that kind of priming and bottling.

Or make ginger wine

If what you really want is a strong ginger drink to sip, ginger wine is the better recipe. It is fermented out under an airlock, still rather than sparkling, and improves with age. Our ginger wine recipe has the amounts, the ABV math and a spiced Christmas version.

Flavor Variations

More bite

Grating the ginger instead of slicing it, or simmering it longer, gives a hotter drink. Madden notes that some recipes grate rather than slice and crush, and that others boil the mixture before adding the yeast to extract more flavor. A slice of fresh chili in the bowl adds heat of a different kind.

Jamaican style

Madden mentions that Jamaican ginger beer is sometimes made with lime instead of lemon juice. Swap the lemon for one or two limes and use brown sugar for a darker, rounder drink.

Spiced

His list of optional spices includes chili, nutmeg, licorice, vanilla, cardamom, cloves, juniper, fennel, coriander and star anise. Add them with the ginger and they will be strained out with it. Start with one at a time so you know which one you like.

Make and drink alcoholic drinks responsibly, and only if you are of legal drinking age.