Fermentation Adventures: Apple Ginger Beer Fail

Kombucha got me stuck on fermenting and now I've been trying all different fermenting projects with varying degrees of success. Truth be told it's not all about throwing ingredients in a jar and forgetting about them for awhile, as I've found. There's almost always a method to be followed and rules to be followed for the best chance at success.

So as many of you know(I'll share links below for those who do not) I've been experimenting with the simple ferment known as the ginger bug. Starting with small amounts of ginger, sugar and water which is fed to it every day, you end up with a bubbly yeast slurry which is useful as a starter for ginger beer. When I went to actually make the beer, I found out most is made with a sugared lemon or lime water, which is tasty but wasn't what I was going for. I also didn't have either of those things.

We have a juicer now so we asked @modprobe to bring by some apples. I decided if I'm gonna buy ingredients for it I'll go all out and try apple ginger soda, which should have been awesome. I'm not sure if it was the fact that they were red delicious or something else, but the juice was hard to drink and the ferment was GROSS. It looked pretty though.

Here's a shot of the ginger bug just before I harvested it. You know it's really active when the ginger floats and there's huge air bubbles around. It tasted nice and slightly yeasty by itself. I've flavored kombucha with it at this point and it does add a ginger-beery quality to it for sure.

What I used
1 kg apples for about 3.5 cups juice
1/4 cup ginger bug
Glass Jar
Coffee Filter
Hairtye

How I did it

1. Juice the apples and strain out the pulp into a quart sized glass jar, clean and sterile.
2. Add 4 tablespoons of ginger bug with pulp, into the jar.

1. Cover with coffee filter and secure with rubber band, keep next to your ginger bug and allow to ferment 1-3 days.

This pulp went straight to some happy chickens.

1. Strain out the ginger and bottle into a flip top bottle, allow to ferment in the dark to build pressure for another 1-3 days, burping occasionally every 12 hours. This is an extremely active ferment, explosions are common.

Thoughts on the recipe:

I loosely followed a recipe I found online and honestly, I don't think the recipe was to blame for how this turned out. I should have known when I tasted the juice after starting the ferment that it wasn't going to be good. It ended tasting like ginger flavored rotted apples. I know it's fermented but that's a bit much, so next time I'll try maybe a granny smith or gala and see how that turns out. For now, this was a fail, but it was a fail on my part.

I'll try this again hopefully with better results, so stay tuned! I'll also try it with lemons or limes, whichever look nicer when I go to the store.

The fizz was good, I think there's a lot of potential for this one! In the meantime, I'll drink my strawberry ginger bug booch.

Check out some of my other recent posts!