In the summer heat, I caught myself thinking that my body didn’t have enough drinks. What do we do with our households to quench their thirst: we cook compotes, crush fruit drinks, drink mineral water, factory-made ciders and kvass. I have always loved “Schweppes” (aka “Schweppes” on behalf of a German entrepreneur from the mid-18th to early 19th centuries) for its cooling effect, pleasant bitterness and taste. And so I set out to make it at home. It turns out that you can achieve a similar taste, the main thing is to know the composition and understand the essence of producing homemade carbonated cocktails.
So, I offer a recipe for homemade ginger lemonade, which will taste exactly like that same Schweppes. Perhaps someone will also be interested in this recipe, and will like this drink, just like me.
Ingredients
Lemonade contains the following products:- 5 lemons;
- 100 grams of fresh ginger root;
- 1 kg sugar;
- 2 tsp dry yeast;
- 20 liters of boiled water.
You can drink lemonade already on the second day, and then the drink continues to infuse, ferment a little, gain gas and even some alcoholic strength.As a result, if you leave it too long (which is about 3 weeks), it can become unpleasantly bitter. In this case, you need to pour it into a large container, add sugar again to taste, and pour it back into the bottles. After a day, the lemonade will gain sharpness again and regain its former freshness.
As a result, such ginger ale can be stored for many weeks without the risk of poisoning or spoiling the product.
Step-by-step process for making Schweppes-type lemonade
I set the water to boil. I have this volume of water in two containers. I take a 10 liter bucket and a 12 liter pan. Before the water boils, I cut the washed lemons into slices along with the seeds and small pieces of ginger along with the peel. I prepare it for grinding in a meat grinder.
I set aside the ingredients ground in a meat grinder until the water boils. Over medium heat, water boils for 40 minutes.
While the water is boiling, carefully add the lemon-ginger mixture and remove from the heat. At this stage, you need to let the liquid cool to room temperature. Usually, 3-4 hours in a ventilated area is enough for this, but if desired, the process can be accelerated by placing the containers in something cold.
I strain the cooled lemonade through two types of strainers to remove excess fractions and leave almost completely purified liquid.
I dissolve sugar and yeast in the resulting liquid. If for some reason someone does not like carbonated drinks, then adding yeast can be skipped. In this case, you simply get a refreshing lemon-ginger compote, ready to eat immediately. However, I still recommend adding yeast to maintain the original idea and make the lemonade “for adults.”
To prevent the yeast from spoiling and to enter into the correct reaction with the environment, it should be introduced only when the temperature of our lemonade drops below 40 degrees Celsius. It will already be difficult for yeast to fight such an aggressive environment, so there is no need to add a temperature problem to it.
I pour the almost finished lemonade into plastic bottles and place them in a row in a room that is not very hot, but not very cold either. Ideally 20-24 degrees. Before pouring, the liquid must be mixed well, after waiting until the yeast is completely dissolved. This ensures that each bottle of lemonade will subsequently taste the same.
After a day, you need to try the bottles for strength. If the plastic has not hardened under the pressure of the natural gas evolution process, then you need to try what you got. If the lemonade is sweet, and you haven’t messed up anything with the proportions, then you need to add a pinch of yeast to each bottle (by default, 1.5 liters). The fact is that, as mentioned earlier, the yeast has to survive in an aggressive ginger environment, which is aggravated by lemon, and sometimes it is not easy for it to ferment. In this case, giving the yeast a little help is the right decision. The main thing you must achieve is the hardening of the bottles, whose contents will smoothly turn into the correct Schweppes lemonade.
Attention! To avoid bottle rupture due to excess pressure, never leave capped homemade ale unattended for long periods of time.Ginger lemonade prepared according to this recipe is significantly inferior in its “vigor” to the same homemade kvass, which is much easier to break into a bottle. However, if the carbonation process is going well, I remember to release the air every day by lifting the caps on each bottle for a moment and screwing them back on. If you skip this moment, leaving the bottles for, say, a week, the plastic can swell or tear off the cap, even causing the bottle to burst.
All. This homemade refreshing drink is ready to drink!
It goes great with a straw and ice. Be careful, this lemonade is not suitable for children, because ginger gives bitterness, and lemon gives acidity. In addition, gradually during the fermentation process, after about five days of infusion, it smoothly passes into the category of low-alcohol products and, depending on the amount of sugar, its pungency varies.
Bon appetit!
