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Making your own ginger bug is easy, and it can be used for making homemade probiotic sodas and a sweet, mildly acidic, homemade ginger vinegar from scratch.
Over the years I have fermented all sorts of things, from making my own yogurt and kefir, to making sourdough, sauerkraut, and kimchi. At any given moment in time, you are likely to find my kitchen inhabited by several unusual looking substances in large mason jars covered with cloth. Right now you would find kombucha, soy sauce & miso (hopefully coming soon to the blog), kimchi, and ginger vinegar happily fermenting in various parts of my house.
Ginger vinegar was one of those things that I made by accident, much like kombucha vinegar and water kefir vinegar. When you forget about things and ferment them for too long, you tend to end up with vinegar. Sometimes the result isn’t very pleasant, but other times you end up with something wonderful, like this ginger vinegar made with a ginger bug.
What is a ginger bug?
If you aren’t familiar with the term, a ginger bug probably sounds like some horrific creepy crawly thing that one would never want to deal with, but instead it is a ferment that you make yourself, much like a sourdough starter, but with water, ginger, and sugar.
Ginger bugs are usually made as a way to carbonate homemade sodas.
While I’m not much of a soda drinker myself, I do love the challenge of making something fun, new, and probiotic. So, several years ago I had my first try at making a ginger bug and ginger bug soda. It was also the first time I accidentally made ginger vinegar, or ginger bug vinegar.
Over the years I have made several attempts at making ginger ginger ale or ginger beer with the ginger bug. While the results were OK, I’ve found that I prefer kombucha flavored with ginger on the second ferment, so I don’t make them very often. In the end, I actually prefer making ginger vinegar with it, which I happen to love and I especially think it’s amazing when used in my sweet chicken adobo recipe. In any case, I’ll explain the process so that you can try to make your own carbonated beverages before making vinegar, and if I come up with some amazingly tasty recipe for a homemade soda, I’ll share that with you too someday.
How to make a ginger bug.
To make a ginger bug, all you need is a glass jar, filtered water, some sugar, and some fresh ginger. Begin on the first day by adding two cups of filtered water to the jar, along with a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of grated or finely chopped ginger. I have always used white sugar for both kombucha and ginger bug making, but some say it can be done with other types of sugar and sweeteners. Without having tried them out myself, I’m not really sure, but most people tend to agree that white sugar works best for these things. Most of the sugar will get consumed by the fermentation process anyway, so try not to worry about it too much. As for the ginger, you can choose to peel it or not. I usually peel mine because I can’t find an organic ginger around here, but I’m not very careful about peeling it, and purposely leave little bits and pieces of peel that can help introduce local yeasts and bacteria into the ferment.
Once you have put everything into the jar, mix it all up and cover it with a cloth or paper towel and a rubber band. We want air to be able to pass through, but not bugs and dust.
That’s all you need to do on the first day. Now set it aside undisturbed for 24 hours.
The next day, add in another tablespoon of sugar and another tablespoon of grated ginger. Once again cover it and leave it for another day.
Keep repeating the process for the next several days. Depending upon the temperature, you should end up with a happily fermenting ginger bug in around 4-8 days.
You can tell that your ginger bug is ready when you start to see bubbles forming. You’ll also see a white precipitate starting to form and fall to the bottom.
How to make a ginger bug soda.
At this point, you can choose what you want to do with it. If you want to ferment a homemade soda, you’ll just need to decide what sort of soda you want to make, and then make a sugar syrup of sorts with other flavorings added in. Most people either make a mix of sweetened ginger tea with lemon juice to make a ginger beer or ginger ale of sorts, but others choose to make a mix of fruit, like a berry puree, and sugar. When cooled to room temperature, you add your syrup, filtered water, and a bit of healthy ginger bug to airtight bottles, and let the ginger bug do a second fermentation in the sealed bottles to consume the sugar and develop gas.
Be careful with the bottles and regularly check on them. Quite a bit of gas can develop throughout the process, and it can be enough to explode your glass bottles if you leave them unattended for long enough! (I haven’t personally had that happen, though. Knock on wood!)
When you are happy with the amount of carbonation, you can move the soda to the fridge to slow the fermentation process, and your soda is ready to drink.
Looking for a natural soda recipe?
This Pineapple Ginger soda from NourishingTime.com looks pretty tasty to me! 🙂
Going back to the ginger bug and ginger vinegar, though…
If you want to keep making sodas with it, you can either continue to add in ginger, sugar, and a bit of water every once in a while to keep your ginger bug active, or you can rest your ginger bug in the fridge, only needing to add in more sugar and ginger every week or so. If you let it rest in the fridge, you’ll need to take it out and wake it up again by feeding it at room temperature for a couple of days before making soda with it.
On the other hand, if you don’t choose to do either of those things, eventually all of the sugar in your sugar bug will be consumed, and it will become very acidic. I purposely add in some water, sugar, and ginger to my active ginger bug so that I’ll end up making a bigger batch of vinegar, and then cover it and leave it alone for several weeks.
A white film will form over the top of your liquid, which is basically like a forming kombucha SCOBY, but in this case it is the vinegar “mother.”
After several weeks, you can taste the vinegar for acidity.
At first it will be both sweet and acidic. At this point I love drizzling it on spiralized cucumbers for a refreshing cucumber noodle salad!
If you leave it for longer, though, you’ll end up with a more acidic vinegar. In any case this vinegar, even months later, tends to be on the sweeter and less acidic side, much like a mild rice vinegar.
You can choose to stop the process at any time by filtering out the solids, and bottling up the vinegar and leaving it in the fridge. On the other hand, you can choose to do a sort of continuous brew of vinegar by removing small amounts and adding in more water, sugar, and ginger to keep the process going.
I love the taste of this vinegar because it is light and refreshing and has a hint of the flavor of ginger, of course!
Ingredients
- ginger root
- sugar
- filtered water
Instructions
- Add 2 cups filtered water to a jar with a Tbsp. of sugar and a Tbsp. of grated or finely minced ginger.
- Mix everything together and cover the jar with a cloth to keep bugs and dust out. Leave alone for 24 hours.
- After 24 hours, add in another Tbsp. of sugar and another Tbsp. of ginger. (You can also add in a little water whenever you see the mixture too overrun with ginger bits.) Once again, mix everything together and cover with a cloth. Leave it undisturbed for another 24 hours.
- Repeat step 3 each day until you get an active ginger bug. You can tell that your ginger bug is active and ready when you start to see bubbles forming at the top and a white precipitate falling to the bottom. (Normally around 4-8 days)
- Once your ginger bug is ready, you can try to make sodas with it by mixing it with sugar syrup mixtures and filtered water, and doing a second ferment in airtight bottles to build up carbonation.
- On the other hand, you can now abandon your ginger bug for several weeks to make a ginger vinegar. After several weeks of fermentation, you will notice that it will become more and more acidic and less sweet. It should also begin to form a vinegar mother on top which looks like an opaque white kombucha SCOBY.
- You can filter your vinegar at any time and keep it in the fridge or make a continuous brew of sorts by occasionally taking some vinegar out and adding in more filtered water, ginger, and sugar.
- Enjoy on salads or in recipes like my sweet chicken adobo.
Sweet Chicken Adobo
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is it ok to ginger bug become pink?
Hi Arthur,
It sounds like it may have some sort of fungus. I’m not sure though. I guess, though, that when in doubt, it’s best to throw it out and start over.
Thank you for the great information! I have a question. I also have various things fermenting around my house at any given time. I am worried that they will contaminate each other. Is that even a valid concern?
In your experience how far should they be kept from one another? For example I am currently brewing two continuous Kombucha brews, a sourdough starter and two ginger bugs. They are about 15ft apart from each other. Is that sufficient in your opinion? Thank you in advance!
Shelly
Hi Shelly,
Yes, of course, it’s a valid concern. I guess it’s especially valid if you have bought a specific strain of something. On the other hand, if you start a vinegar and sourdough starter with wild yeasts, I’m not sure how much of a difference it would make as they originally came from the same air, you know. (I can’t be sure of that, but it’s the way I think.)
Anyway, I have numerous items fermenting in my kitchen too. I have ginger and apple cider vinegars on the ledge of the extractor above my stove. I have kombucha a few feet away on my kitchen counter. I have homemade soy sauce brewing above my refrigerator in the pantry.
In the end, I haven’t noticed any negative effects from their proximity.
The SCOBY of the kombucha and the specific strains of the soy sauce are really the only bought strains. My thought is that kombucha strains probably wouldn’t negatively affect a vinegar, for example. They may just add more beneficial strains or do nothing at all.
I can’t imagine it would negatively affect the soy sauce either, except for maybe altering the flavor somehow (something I haven’t personally noticed.)
Anyway, yes, I’ve heard to be careful about the cross-contamination, but my guess has been that it is normally stated to be overly cautious- and I would think it would be mostly in order to prevent changes in flavor. I can’t imagine it would otherwise do anything bad to the other cultures. (You can use the liquid of a variety of fermented foods to ferment things like vegan cheese or make fermented ketchup.)
For something like this, I’m not as concerned because it’s easy enough to make a new batch. If you’re concerned about “ruining” your SCOBY’s I’d suggest having an extra somewhere else anyway, to always have a spare in case anything goes wrong. But, honestly, mine are all pretty close and I’ve never noticed anything bad come from it.
I found your post based on my own experiences making fermented ginger soda. I store my sodas in the home brewing beer bottles with the rubber stopper. However, this means the soda will go flat after a week or so when in the fridge. The cool thing about fermented soda though is I can usually put it on the counter for a day and BOOM it’s carbonated again. One time I just kept forgetting to drink my soda and after a few rounds of this attempt to re-carbonate on the counter the soda tasted like vinegar. So basically I didn’t do anything you did. I just let my soda sit on the counter and consume all of its sugars and voila! Vinegar. It never occurred to me to actually use it! I tossed it 🙁
Hi Anna,
Yes, it has happened to me with so many things- accidental kombucha vinegar, water kefir vinegar, etc.
This one is my favorite, though. It’s so delicious- so much so that I purposely make it often. You can just make a big batch and leave it to ferment too.
I use it in my Asian stir fries and LOVE it.
I know this is an older post, but I tried this and mine never formed a mother. It sat for a year and is now very yeasty and alcoholic. Is there anything you can do to encourage the growth of a mother so vinegar occurs instead of alcohol?
Hi Jodi,
Hmmmm- I’m not sure why that happened to you. You normally get an alcohol at first- which then gets converted into vinegar. Every time I’ve done this, though, mine gets converted pretty quickly.
This is going to be a guess- but this is what I would do to try to fix it.
To lower the yeast/alcohol content, add more water and more sugar. Then, make sure it’s getting enough oxygen. That’s important! so, see if you can use a container with a wider mouth and/or use a very thin cloth that allows for more airflow.
Maybe I’ll start a new batch this week so I can make a video and can try this again to see if I can come up with new tips and tricks to better update the post.
I always really loved this vinegar. It’s my favorite. (I also make pineapple and apple vinegar but like this one best!)
hi.
Thank you for this recipe.
I do have a few questions, hope you don’t mind.
1) I started my bug about a week ago and fed it every day sugar and ginger. I did not feed it today, and when I checked on it tonight, all the bubbles were gone. Is that normal?
I did taste it today and it is a pleasant mild ginger ale taste.
If this is normal (the bubbles which stopped) what will happen next? I assume that is will turn into vinegar now?
Then when the mother formed, can I use that for more batches?
Do I only feed it sugar or ginger as well?
How long does the process take using the mother?
And would the vinegar taste the same? Same strength if left for the same amount of time?
I will probably have more questions as the process goes on.
Thanks!
Hi MB,
No problem! I’m happy to answer all of your questions as best I can!
Yes, it’s totally normal for it to stop bubbling. If you want to keep it as an active ginger bug, you’d need to keep it bubbling and active by adding more water, ginger, and sugar, removing the excess as needed. Once you no longer care to work on keeping it up, you can let it “die off” and turn into vinegar. 🙂
It will probably taste like ginger ale in the in between stages. It may also start to taste like ginger beer- as if it had a bit of alcohol in it. That’s all perfectly normal and part of the fermentation process.
To be honest, I’ve never really known what to do with the mother. It’s a pretty quick process to make the vinegar even without it, so I’m not sure how much it speeds up the process if at all. Throwing the mother from a successful batch in with a new batch may help inoculate it with good bacteria and yeasts to help ensure that you will end up with a great vinegar, and, yes, it may speed things up a bit, but I’m not really sure by how much. Maybe I should experiment with a couple of fresh batches: one with a mother and one without. I think that’s the only way I’d really be able to know.
I find that the vinegar ends up getting to a certain acidity, and then basically continues to taste the same, no matter how long you leave it. I occasionally add a bit more vinegar, sugar, and water, just to give it more ingredients to work with and make more vinegar as I use it up. I think of it as sort of like a continuous kombucha brew.
I hope that mostly answers your questions. What I know has all been learned from experimentation. I never really found anybody else who was making the same vinegar when I did a search way back when. Now that I’ve been making it for years, though, I guess I should be able to help out with most questions or issues you may have along the way. 🙂
Thanks!
Hi, do you turn the bug into vinegar in a closed jar (anaerobic) or with only a cloth on?
I let it turn into vinegar with only a cloth on.
If you find it evaporates too quickly, you can add a little water, and can even add a bit more ginger and sugar every once in awhile.
I figure the air will help the mother grow and live better. 🙂
I also don’t want to end up with a carbonated product in the end. (You can make a soda that way, though, with a much shorter fermentation time!)
I had a continuous brew ginger bug going. I stopped drinking it for a short time as I was trying to cut sugar. So, I also ended up making ginger bug vinegar. I mix it with water for a refreshing drink.
Hi Wilma,
That sounds like a great idea! It’s a light flavored vinegar, so I’m sure it would be great for making a switchel type beverage!
For how long it can be stored in the fridge not to rotten?
Hi Robert,
I keep mine out of the fridge, and occasionally add more sugar water and ginger (as I use it), straining out some of the old ginger when too much begins to accumulate in the jar. I’ve kept it that way for many many months, if not years, now. The pH of the vinegar is so low that pathogens don’t really grow in it, and if you keep occasionally adding in more sugar water and new ginger, not only will you help make up for whatever you use up, but you’ll keep it active. I hope that makes sense.
I haven’t tried straining it and placing it in the fridge, because I tend to use it and want to keep it going, but I imagine it would keep for a long time because of its low pH.
What do you do with the vinegar “mother”? Can you use it to ferment something else?
Good question!
I haven’t tried using it to ferment anything else. I’ve just been accumulating them and just letting them all live in a big jar of vinegar. I’d assume that you could do the same sort of things that you can di with kombucha SCOBY’s- including eating them or giving them to any animals you may have. I say that without having tried it, though. 🙂
Maybe I’ll look into it and see if I can find good ideas for excess “mothers.”
This is a great post. It’s on my bucket list to try! thanks for linking up to Simply Natural Saturdays.
Thanks, Jessica.
I love it when accidents turn out wonderfully. 🙂