Make Your Own Ginger Bug for Healthy Sodas

Did you know you can make your own healthy probiotic soda? All you need is your ginger bug and some fruit juice, tea, or other kind of liquid of your choosing. This post will explain what a ginger bug is, what the benefits are, how to maintain it, and how make your own ginger bug from scratch!

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What is a ginger bug?

If you are familiar with sourdough starter, ginger bug is the same idea. A ginger bug is a fermented starter culture used to make probiotic drinks. The only ingredients in a ginger bug are water, ginger, and sugar. During the fermentation process, the ginger bug uses the naturally occurring yeast and bacteria found on the skin of ginger (which is why you need to use organic ginger) and found in your kitchen and feeds on sugar which creates carbon dioxide leading to fizziness or natural carbonation. Your ginger bug and your homemade natural ginger bug soda ends up being very low in sugar since that is what the yeast eats up.

Benefits of Using a Ginger Bug

Ginger bug soda is so beneficial to our gut and overall health. The good bacteria found in ginger bug can help balance the gut flora which leads to so many health benefits. Our immune system lives in our gut. So, a healthy gut is often linked to a stronger immune system. The naturally occurring probiotics help promote a healthy gut microbiome and aid in digestion. The fermentation process can also break food down into more easily digestible forms resulting in better nutrient absorption.

Maintaining Your Ginger Bug

Like a sourdough starter, a ginger bug needs to feed to be happy, healthy, and active. A ginger bug just needs grated or diced organic unpeeled ginger and sugar to feed off of. You can store your ginger bug on your counter and feed it daily or you can store it in the fridge and feed it about once a week. Also like sourdough, there is no exact or strict formula for how to make your ginger bug or how to maintain it. Everyone seems to do it a little bit differently.

I keep my ginger bug in a closed glass jar in the fridge most of the time unless I want to make soda. In which case, I’ll take it out of the fridge, feed it, and let it come to room temperature. It is usually fizzy and active a few hours later so then that’s when I’ll use it to make soda. I have also pulled it straight from the fridge and used it to make soda right away. Like I said, there is no perfect formula. This whole process is pretty forgiving in my experience.

Each time I feed it, I stir in about a tablespoon of diced organic ginger and a tablespoon of sugar. I always keep about 2 cups of ginger bug on hand. So, after I strain some into a swing-top glass bottle to make soda, I’ll pour more filtered water into my ginger bug to replace what I took out and bring it back to around the 2 cup mark. I also sometimes put any ginger that got strained out back into the ginger bug. Whenever you feel like you have too much ginger in your ginger bug, you can strain some out and throw it away or compost it.

Some people leave their ginger bug jar open with a cheese cloth on top and some people use honey instead of sugar. when feeding their ginger bug. In my experience, I have found that having the lid closed all the time and using organic sugar gives you the best results.

Why You Need to Use Only ORGANIC Ginger

Organic ginger has naturally occurring yeast and bacteria on its skin which is where the yeast in the ginger bug comes from (as well as your environment). Regular, nonorganic ginger may be irradiated and treated with pesticides which kills the wild yeast and good bacteria that your ginger bug needs to properly ferment.

Signs to Look For

A happy, healthy, active ginger bug will have a pleasant yeasty, sweet smell. It will be bubbly and fizzy when stirred or when you open the lid. The liquid will be a slightly cloudy, yellow color with a white sludge-looking substance on the bottom. When your ginger bug looks like this, it’s the perfect time to use it to make healthy, probiotic soda!

Do not use your ginger bug if there is a slimy texture, unpleasant odor, brown liquid, or mold in it. You will need to throw it away and make a new one. If it does not have any of these bad signs but isn’t bubbly or fizzy either, it just simply needs to be fed!

Basic Recipe Formula for Turning Your Ginger Bug into Probiotic Soda

For one 16oz swing-top bottle of ginger bug soda, strain about 1/4 to 1/3 cup ginger bug into the bottle. You can put the strained ginger back into the ginger bug jar or toss it. Then fill up the rest of your bottle with whatever liquid you choose while leaving a two inch headspace on top. Make sure your liquid has some kind of sugar so that the yeast has something to feed on so that it can ferment your soda and make it naturally fizzy and probiotic. Fruit juices are a great option because of the naturally occurring sugar. You can always add more sugar or honey to your liquid to make sure it has enough to feed on.

Let your soda sit on the counter to ferment for about 2 days while opening the lid about every 12 hours (see warning below). Each time you open the lid, taste the soda as the flavor changes the longer it ferments. Once you’re satisfied with the taste of your drink, store it in the same bottle in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. It will continue fermenting but the fridge will slow it down drastically, so you will not have to open the bottle so often.

Enjoy straight from the bottle or pour over ice.

WARNING!! When your ginger bug soda is fermenting in the swing-top glass bottle on the counter, make SURE you open the bottles at least once every 12 hours to release the pressure built up from the fermentation process. It is best to open the lid very slowly and maybe even open and close it repeatedly until all the pressure is released. Otherwise if you open it too quickly while there is a lot of pressure, the lid can fly off and your drink will fizz way up and overflow, similar to champagne. Open the bottle over the sink and pointed in a safe direction just in case this happens to you. If you go too long without doing this, your bottle could explode.

You can find easy, yummy ginger bug soda recipes in my Probiotic Drinks category.

Ingredients

Organic ginger make sure it is organic! We get ours from Azure Standard.

Organic cane sugar this may be the only time you’ll hear me recommend cane sugar over honey. I have found that the ginger bug is much happier and more active with cane sugar than with honey. I’ve made a ginger bug using honey and it just does not get as active and is harder to keep it going, but definitely not impossible. So, I recommend using organic cane sugar to make your ginger and maintain it and then use honey for the rest of your soda recipes. I do not worry about using cane sugar for the ginger bug because it is eaten up by the yeast making it a very low sugar drink. We get our organic cane sugar from Azure Standard

Filtered water we use this countertop water filter

Tools You May Need

Mason jar

Swing-top glass bottles for making soda

Mesh strainer or cheese cloth

Funnel

PIN TO SAVE FOR LATER

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