Simple Homemade Ginger Ale

I've been making drinks, I don't know if you'd call them "aides" or what, using different combinations of lemon, lime, rosemary, basil and ginger for a few weeks now and am falling in love with ginger. Wanting to get my feet wet in the department of home brewing, I've decided to try a simple recipe for making ginger ale. I've put this process together from a little interneting research. This is my first try, so we'll see how it goes.

List of ingredients:

2 Limes

about 3/4 cup fresh ginger

1/4 cup granular sugar

a little fresh rosemary (maybe 1/2 teaspoon)

1/4 teaspoon Fleischmann's active dry yeast

pinch of sea salt

 

I don't have a juicer yet (hint hint Santa Claus), so here's my way of doing it. With a knife I slice into each segment of the halved lime, squeeze once to get it loose, then put a spoon into it and work the bottom of the spoon around the concavity of the lime to get all the juice and meat out into my bowl.

The rosemary goes right into the juice with a pinch of sea salt to get the extraction of flavor started.

 This is how much fresh ginger I used. That's a quarter cup measuring cup in the photo. The skin comes off with a knife and I chop it a little to get the precess of blending started.

 This is what it looks like with the ginger put into the juice of the two limes. It came out to a little over a cup.

 
Using my immersion blender I munched up the ingredients. This is when I put in the sugar. I should have left a little to get the yeast going in the 2 liter bottle, but I forgot, so I just pinched a little sugar into the bottle before adding the yeast into the bottle with a little water.

 

Here is my process for getting all the flavor out of the "mash" of juice, ginger and herb: Step 1 - I strained the above mixture into a bowl, a little at a time and pressed it with the back of a spoon to get the liquid to come out. Step 2 - I put the strained mash back into my mixing cup, added more water, stirred the mash into the water and strained again into the same bowl. I don't have a funnel, so I used my baster to put the liquid from the bowl into the 2 liter bottle. I repeated step 2 until I had enough liquid to fill the bottle. Doing a little at a time this way allows me to get all the flavor out of my mash. If you don't believe me, taste the liquid from the third or fourth straining and you'll know how much flavor is still coming out in this seemingly clear liquid. Leave about an inch of air above the liquid and squeeze the bottle a little before capping tight. The idea is that when the fermentation takes place and the bottle expands you will see this dent come out and know that you are on your way to being done. I guess you want the bottle to be very tight, but not to explode! I put this in a plastic bag inside a paper bag and placed it in a part of my apartment that would be easy to clean up if it does explode.

I have set an alarm to remind me to check the bottle tomorrow at the same time. Supposedly, it's should take 24 to 48 hours for the bottle to get tight.

I'll be back tomorrow to check on the progress of fermentation. Now to clean up. Yay!