Ginger Snaps Back: A Girl and her Gingerbug

I'm sure your first question is, What on earth is a ginger bug?  It's just a culture of beneficial bacteria, similar to a sourdough starter, except instead of using it to make bread, you use it to make lacto-fermented soda (so much better than what it sounds). 

For a long time, I have dreamed of making my own rootbeer.  I love soda, that is real soda without high fructose corn syrup, or aspartame, or artificial flavoring.  I want the real McCoy. One particular pet peeve of mine is root beer marketed as"Old Fashioned" that contains HFC or artificial flavors.

True old fashioned root beer was lacto fermented.  There appears to be several ways to do this, using whey (that liquid leftover when you strain yogurt), a kefir culture, or using a ginger bug.  

I decided against the kefir as it seemed to require a significant initial investment (spending  $27 plus shipping) on the kefir starter packets.  Why I didn't try the whey method first, I don't know.  Maybe I wanted someone to keep Captain Trips (my sourdough starter) company on the counter.  Of the three methods, creating a Ginger Bug requires the highest level of patience and initial time investment.

I've seen numerous recipes for how to make a ginger bug with varying instructions on the amount of ginger, sugar, and water to add.  I don't think the amount of water matters very much.  What I decided on was 1 tablespoon each water, sugar, and finely chopped ginger added each day.

After 1 day it smells like ginger and sugar.

After 2 days still smells mostly like ginger, but starting to get a faint alcoholic smell with a sort of lemony undertone.

After 3 days the alcoholic smell has intensified a bit.

After 4 days smells like lemony ginger hooch.  No bubbles.  No sound.

By the end of day 5 the smell is the same, but if I look closely, I see some small bubbles.  Still don't hear anything though.

Day 6.   Still smells like ginger hooch, there are a lot of bubbles and the ginger bug snaps and hisses at me.  I think it is ready for soda making.

I'm pretty certain I have a successful ginger bug starter.  So I should have some posts pretty soon on my experimentations with lacto-fermented beverages.  I plan on making a stab at Ginger Beer first to make sure ginger bug actually works, as Root Beer requires finding and buying a bunch of obscure herbs.