Home-Brewed Blue Ginger Ale

I’m probably the last person in the world to come to gingerbugs and home-brewed ginger ale. Recipes are a-plenty out there, each one making the process seem simpler than the one before so you get to thinking they must be failproof and foolproof. But if that’s so then I’m a fool that’s failed and more than once.

The story goes a little something like this: you cultivate your own ginger bug by mixing ginger (grated, minced, scraped–it’s your mood and your choice) with sugar, and water in proportions I’ll share, for my memory as much as your own, below. Then you feed this bug with more ginger and more sugar for a week or longer and it will start to bubble and fizz, at which point you take a small portion of the starter, and add it to a bottle of sweetened water plus any added flavors (think: spices like cardamom or fruits like pineapple) and let it be for another week or so. At the end of all this, you should have your own home-brewed bottle of nicely fizzy ginger ale.

Well I did it all and I didn’t. A few times over.

The striking blue in the images above, while lovely, actually indicated failure–the slight acidity brought on by a good fermentation alters the ph and therefore color to a lavender-mauve.

So I changed my water source. Added more water. I started leaving my ginger bug bottle outside, where it’s warmer. No, where it’s cooler. In the sun. In the shade. I begged a friend who grows ginger down in Papanasam to send me some of his freshly harvested, for-sure-organic stock. I added more ginger. I added less ginger.

Nothing worked. No fabled fizziness, no natural aeration. Just a mild-tempered bottle of ginger flotsam. Smelled fine, so I left it alone and kept hoping that somehow, something would kick start better bubbling, but it never did. As much as I ever got in visible wild yeast activity, you can see on the left image below. After several days of ginger additions, even organic stuff, still only flaccidity. If you’ve ever read Hermann Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—my ginger bug was Bartleby who answered every question with the placid, impenetrable “I’d prefer not to.”

Must’ve been a week or longer that I just ignored Bottleby [yes, named after the Scrivener] after that. I’d glance, see a bubble or two and leave it alone.

I must have been on the verge of accepting that I was the exception to every rule out there, or that there was something in my hand–kai gunam or kai manam as we say–that could get a good idli batter to ferment, but was killing the ginger bug–when one of the boys asked me one day for a blue drink, and I went to the fridge to look for some of the concentrate I usually have on hand.

What I found instead was an old bottle of shanku pushpam/butterfly pea/aparajita/Clitoria ternatea which I think I’d fermented–I must have, because it sure wasn’t sweet but it sure was blue. And, when I popped the cap to taste, it was like releasing a pressure valve. For all that time in the fridge, lost and quite forgotten, the wild yeasts in this liquid had been quietly working away.

Quite without a second thought and in a series of almost perfectly rehearsed movements, I mixed the requisite 1/2 cup of my very uninspiring Bottleby bug with some sugar, water, and all this blue liquid. Left it out undisturbed for a week or was it longer? at the end of which, at last, the fairy tale ending.

A smoky bottle. A perfectly fizzy ginger ale. That unmistakable blue of the shanku pushpam. Blue ginger, if you ever did see.

And “the best ginger ale we’ve had, Amma” from the boys who’ve had home-brews aplenty here in Auroville, so I’ll take that as an honest appraisal.

The only question was–wait, what? How did I do this again?

Thinking back, what I’d done was to combine one starter with another–using part of one (gingerbug) and the whole of the other (shanku pusham) to achieve an acceptable result.

I’m quite sure as I type this up that ginger as such had very little role in this episode of fermentation. The more active wild yeasts really did seem to come from the shanku pushpam–that was the kick-starter I’d been seeking. Ginger was crucial in adding taste, however, and masking the not-unpleasant (but nothing to go hunting down) herbaceousness of the shanku pushpam itself.

I know that gingerbugs can be made with whey to achieve more uniform and assured successes; Lord knows I tried the classic, purist route hard enough, but never succeeded. The shanku pushpam addition felt a little like cheating, but white lies really {shrugs shoulders} and a little help from garden flowers are all I have.

[The images above, Left to Right: Bottleby alongside the shanku pushpam starter, plus a bottle of the mostly filtered liquid waiting to aerate; and various blue ginger ale bottles lined up to be ignored for a week or more.]

My whole reverse-engineered process is outlined in the “recipe” below, but it’s not a recipe really. It’s a method, one which may work like a pop right away for you, and one which may take its sweet own time depending on ambient temperatures, heat and light conditions, the magic of your hands, or just the temperaments of the wild yeasts you have around.

Be patient, and while it helps to just ignore your gingerbug starters or slow ferments from time to time, the moral of my story is not to give up on them even if they do resemble Melville’s Bartleby a touch too closely.

The other moral of the story is that if your ginger bug is failing or (more likely) just very weak, something else could well kick it into action–so you get that unmistakable ginger beer taste, perhaps with some added color or flavor. Shanku pushpam works well because it really has no very distinctive taste of its own, at least not anything that isn’t masked by ginger, which rather overwhelms. What it misses in taste, it adds in color and stunning visual appeal.

In place of shanku pushpam, you could try other locally available edible flowers. Hibiscus or blue passion flowers, roselles might work also as they ferment beautifully but careful, as they also pack a sour punch. In other places: elder flowers and wisteria–resources like Marie Viljoen’s Forage, Harvest, Feast will have other ideas.