Home-brewed Blue Ginger Ale

This is home-brewed ginger ale or ginger beer fermented that's colored with the blue of fresh butterfly pea flowers and fermented with the aid of wild yeasts on both ginger and the butterfly pea, what we call in India shanku pushpam or aparajita. The process is long, but as satisfying as the result--your own richly flavored probiotic aerated drink--and a bit addictive. You'll not want the hyper sweet stuff from a soda can ever again! I've adapted the gingerbug and ginger beer recipes from Payal's recipe notes on Kobo Fermentary, with grateful thanks for her generous and open sharing.

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Ingredients

For the gingerbug starter

200 ml or 1 cup water
2 tablespoons grated or minced ginger, cleaned but with the skin on
2 tablespoons sugar
More grated ginger and sugar for daily feedings for about 7-10 days.

For the shanku pushpam starter

200 ml or 1 cup water
A large handful of fresh butterfly pea flowers. Dried won’t do.
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ cup of the gingerbug starter from the the prior step
More flowers and sugar for daily feedings for about 2-3 days.

For the blue ginger ale

All the shanku pushpam starter from the previous step
1/3 cup sugar or to taste
2-3 cups water

Instructions

Make the ginger bug starter

Assemble the water, 2T (T=Tablespoon) grated ginger, and 2T sugar in a clean glass jar. Mix well, cap loosely, and leave this out.
Every morning, feed this with an additional 1T sugar and 1T minced ginger.
Eventually this starts to bubble a little (or a lot) and smell like an aged ginger. You can taste it a little—if it smells good and tastes good, then the gingerbug is still good.
If it doesn’t look like it’s doing much, not to worry. Keep feeding daily, or every other day after about a week or so, and leave it be.

Make the shanku pushpam starter

Start this process when you’re about halfway or more into the week of making the ginger bug starter—day 4/5. Also see the notes at the end.
Assemble the first handful of flowers, sugar, ginger bug starter and water in a clean jar. Mix well, cap loosely and leave this out.
For 2-3 days, add additional flowers and 1T sugar. Mix again, and leave out.
After 2-3 days, strain the flowers and ginger flotsam out. Taste and smell the liquid—you should only smell gingery herbaceousness, and nothing else unpleasant. It may not taste very good, but should have the sharpness of ginger plus other herby tones and feel like if it’s sweetened, it will be fine. Which it will.

Make blue ginger ale

Now add to the strained shanku pushpam starter enough water to make this a total of about ¾ liter or a little over half-to-three-quarters of a regular 1 liter swing top bottle, and 1/3 cup sugar. Mix well, transfer to the swing top bottle, and leave this out on a kitchen counter, away from any direct heat (from a cooking source, for example), for several days, maybe up to a week.
Keep in mind that this 1/3 cup of sugar is mostly "food" for the yeasts still at work, so the ginger ale at the end will not be overly sweet. (You can taste and adjust that later, no worry).
Your blue ginger ale might be ready in a lot less than a week, so keep an eye on the surface of the liquid, on which patches of white bubbles should start to appear—at which point really, it’s ready, but you can wait another day or so to allow more fizz to develop.
If you’re in doubt about how much your bottle can take, or you’re wanting to use the blue ginger ale later than it’s become ready, then just transfer to a fridge to slow the fermentation process down. You’ll want to chill the bottle before opening anyway—ginger ale in whatever color is a drink best served cold!

Notes

A shortcut to making blue ginger ale is to skip the process of making the gingerbug starter separately, and just add the same quantity of minced ginger to the shanku pushpam flower-water-sugar combination, and continue this for the same 2-3 days. The proceed with the steps under “make blue ginger ale.” Your ginger beer might take longer to fizz up, but it likely will. I’ve typically had some old and as I say relatively inactive starter though, so I’ve just always added some of that.
Alternatively, you can also just strain—bottle—refrigerate the shanku pushpam starter from Note 1 above until later when you’re ready with the gingerbug starter. You might want to do this if you have a lot of shanku pushpam flowers coming after rains. When you’re ready to use the blue liquid/shanku pushpam starter, add ¼ cup of the ginger bug starter proceed with the steps under “make blue ginger ale.” Unless you notice signs of spoilage, the strained shanku pushpam starter liquid should keep (and keep fermenting) in the fridge for a few weeks at least. Be sure to burp the bottle periodically, just to be safe!