Fermentation Alley

Thought I'd start this topic up again!

Once again I have a pantry shelf full of stuff on the bubble: Sauerkraut; raw goat milk kefir (first time--usually I use pasteurized cows milk); kefir beer (apple juice with a kefir grain). Soon to come: Kimchi and mustard. Just finished: The yummiest ketchup I have ever eaten.

On the old site I told you about some ginger beer I made, except I used molasses instead of sugar. The first time we cracked a bottle, it was...odd-tasting. It was very molasses-y and it had a strange sort of banana-y aftertaste.

Consequently we didn't crack any more bottles for a while and I forgot about the remaining bottles (safe from exploding in a cooler--well, if they did explode they would have been contained in the cooler anyway). A couple of months later I remembered the stuff and put it in the fridge.

A couple weeks after that I cracked a bottle and what do you know! It was pretty darn drinkable! And not too alcoholic to drink, even. It was like a (very mildly alcoholic) stout; a serious beer drinker would have turned his nose up at it as "near beer," but for us it was pretty good. We're not going to make it with molasses again, but it bodes well for future ginger beer experiments.