Ginger beer plant

Several ginger beer brands on a supermarket shelf

Ginger beer plant (GBP), a form of fermentation starter, is used to create the fermentation process. The grains called ginger beer plant, which according to Martinus Beijerinck^[5] were brought by the British soldiers while returning to their country from the Crimean War in 1855, were defined by Harry Marshall Ward as “beverage containing a symbiotic mixture of yeast and bacteria, and containing sufficient amounts of nitrogenous organic matter and beet sugar or cane sugar in its aqueous solution”.^[6] The GBP was first described by Ward in 1892, from samples he received in 1887.^[7][8][9]

Also known as "bees wine", "Palestinian bees", "Californian bees", and "balm of Gilead",^[10][11] it is not a plant but a composite organism comprising the yeast Saccharomyces florentinus (formerly S. pyriformis) and the bacterium Lactobacillus hilgardii (formerly Brevibacterium vermiforme),^[12][7] which form a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). It forms a gelatinous substance that allows it to be easily transferred from one fermenting substrate to the next, much like kefir grains, kombucha, and tibicos.^[13] Original ginger beer is brewed by leaving water, sugar, ginger, optional ingredients such as lemon juice and cream of tartar, and GBP to ferment for several days, converting some of the sugar into alcohol. GBP may be obtained from several commercial sources. Until about 2008 laboratory-grade GBP was available only from the yeast bank Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen in Germany (catalogue number DMS 2484),^[11] but the item is no longer listed. The National Collection of Yeast Cultures (NCYC) had an old sample of "Bees wine" as of 2008, but current staff have not used it, and NCYC are unable to supply it for safety reasons, as the exact composition of the sample is unknown.^[11]

In the UK, the origins of the original ginger beer plant is unknown. When a batch of ginger beer was made using some ginger beer "plant" (GBP), the jelly-like residue was also bottled and became the new GBP. Some of this GBP was kept for making the next batch of ginger beer, and some was given to friends and family, so the plant was passed on through generations. Following Ward's research and experiments, he created his own ginger beer from a new plant that he had made, and he proposed, but did not prove, that the plant was created by contaminants found on the raw materials, with the yeast coming from the raw brown sugar and the bacteria coming from the ginger root.^[14]

Yeast starter

An alternative method of instigating fermentation is using a ginger beer starter, often called a "ginger bug", which can be made by fermenting a mixture of water, brewer's or baker's yeast (not the SCOBY described above), ginger, and sugar. This is kept for a week or longer, with sugar regularly added, e.g., daily, to increase alcohol content. More ginger may also be added. When finished, this concentrated mix is strained, diluted with water and lemon juice, and bottled.^[15][16] This is the process used by some commercial ginger beer makers. Ginger beer made from a yeast-based starter is reported to not have the same taste or mouth feel as that made with ginger beer plant. The near-complete loss of the ginger beer plant is likely due to the decrease in home brewing and the increased commercial production of ginger beer in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Large-scale breweries favoured the use of yeast, as used in conventional beer-making, because of ease for scaled production.