#beetle rocket

aka "this jar is your new best friend"

brewing soda at home is actually pretty easy. to get started, you need:

a week or two

a mason jar + lid

a lot of fresh ginger

some sugar

sugary drink of choice (juice, herbal tea, a root beer...etc)

pop top bottles like these

a strainer of some kind

you need to make a ginger bug. kinda like a sourdough starter, this is a wild yeast culture u befriend, feed daily, and harness to give urself delicious food.

starting a ginger bug is about a week of paying attention to a jar for five minutes every day. it's a lot less intimidating than it seems, i promise!

to start a ginger bug, you need:

2 cups of water

2 tsp of sugar

1 ounce of diced fresh ginger

put it in your mason jar. seal it, leave it on a shelf somewhere dark at room temp, and ignore it until tomorrow! maybe give it a name. the next day, and every day after that for about a week, open the jar and add:

1 tsp sugar

1/2 ounce diced fresh ginger

you won't see a lot of progress for the first couple days, but as time goes on, it will start giving off a nice, bread-y smell. then, it will start pressurizing the jar in between feedings. you'll know it's ready to use when it fizzes after being stirred.

to give you an idea of what to look for, here's a video of my ginger bug, gingely, fizzing away happily:

once you have an established ginger bug, you can start making soda! you can soda-ify any sugary liquid. sweetened herbal tea, fruit juice, or you can follow a recipe for root beer or ginger ale or something.

making soda with a ginger bug:

you need 7.5 units of soda base

and 0.5 units of ginger bug liquid.

it doesn't matter how big the units are (ounces, cups, whatever), just that the ratio is correct.

strain your ginger bug liquid through a fine mesh or cheesecloth

mix well with your soda base

put into pop top bottles, then seal.

leave your bottles out at room temperature to let them ferment and get fizzy. this can take 1-3 days or so, depending on your ginger bug and how fizzy you want it.

MAKE SURE YOU OPEN THEM ONCE A DAY WHILE THEY ARE FERMENTING. otherwise the bottles will explode :)

once they've reached acceptable fizz levels, put them in the fridge! the cold temperature will put the yeast to sleep and stop the fermentation process. you don't need to open them anymore unless you want to drink one. be careful though - it can start up again if you leave them out for too long.

pics from the process for my first batch of beetle rocket root beer!

i foraged the sassafras myself. it was a lot of fun, but next time i am bringing gloves. i had some gnarly blisters :') my dad helped me with the wintergreen!

spices! from left, clockwise: sassafras, anise, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, wintergreen.

we steeped it overnight, and strained it through cheesecloth. honestly the straining took longer than everything else put together.

due to popular request, here is the recipe i used for the first batch of rhinoceros root beer!

buckle up, yall, this one is....wild. it's wild. it's based on old-fashioned, medicinal root beers, so it may not taste how you expect! it is good though. it tastes a little bit like mulled cider and root beer had a baby, heavy on the spice, heavy on the molasses, and with a lot of anise on the back end.

this recipe makes 90 oz of root beer.

ingredients and tools:

1.5 oz chopped sassafras root (if you can't forage your own, you can order root bark online!)

grate about 1/4 of a whole nutmeg

snap 2 cinnamon sticks in half

17 wintergreen leaves, chopped

10 whole allspice, crushed

6 cloves, crushed

4 star anise, crushed

zest of one orange

2 tb vanilla

1 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup + 4 tb molasses

16 oz of ginger bug starter liquid

74 oz of filtered water

a cheesecloth

a wire strainer

pop top bottles (like these. this is really important lol any other bottle WILL either explode or send the lid into space)

put your water in a big pot and add in all your spices. bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

add in your molasses and brown sugar, stir til dissolved, simmer another 15 minutes. remove from heat, cover, and let steep overnight.

the next day, strain your mixture through cheesecloth to get out all the chunks and stuff. add in the ginger bug liquid, mix until combined.

transfer to pop-top bottles, let ferment at room temperature for a couple days. OPEN EVERY BOTTLE ONCE A DAY WHILE FERMENTING. if you don't, they will explode :)