Tag: Ginger beer plant

It’s day five for my ginger beer plant and by now the naturally-occurring yeast and the bacteria that I added on the skins of the sultanas should have started bubbling away. There were just one or two bubbles yesterday morning, so I decided to leave it until today before adding the first additional feed of two teaspoons of sugar and one of ground ginger.

There’s definitely been a lot of activity as there’s what looks like a microbial mat a centimetre deep at the bottom of the jar but at the top, those little islands look as if they’re going mouldy so I wonder if the mixture has died and turned ‘sour’.

Hopefully, now that its been fed, it will start bubbling away. The mixture so far smells exactly like old-fashioned ginger beer.

I’ve started a Futurelearn online course about ‘Bugs, Brains and Beasts’ and, as our practical work for week one, we’ve been asked to conduct an experiment in microbiology: to start brewing a batch of ginger beer.

We’ve put five ingredients into the ginger beer ‘plant’: lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, ground ginger and, to provide the yeast for the fermentation process, five sultanas. The yeast and bacterium needed for the process occur naturally on the skin of grapes. If all goes well, the yeast Saccharomyces florentinus and the bacterium Lactobacillus higardii should start bubbling away during the next seven days. I’ll feed them daily on ground ginger and sugar.

Link

The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts, a free Futurelearn course run by the biosciences department of the University of York