Homemade Fizzy Lemonade

In my quest for a healthier lifestyle, I went looking for an alternative for my fizzy soft drink vice. In this instructable, we'll walk through the steps of making 2 liters of fizzy lemonade with ginger and lemon. I enjoy making and drinking this lemonade, and experimenting with different fruits and spices, and I hope you will too!

Tools

• a cooking pot (at least 2L) & a cooking fire
• a knife & a cutting board
• 2x 1L fliptop bottles (mine are from Ikea) or recycled soft drink bottles
• a spoon
• a bowl
• a funnel & a sieve

Ingredients

• 3 lemons
• 80g fresh ginger
• 2L water
• 200gr white sugar
• 3gr instant yeast

optional

• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• +/- 20 fresh mint leaves
• 100gr of your favorite berries (tastes amazing with raspberry, blueberry, strawberry - and all of them combined!)

Heat up 2 liters of water on a cooking fire until it boils. Add 200 grams of white sugar to the water and stir until it's completely dissolved. I recommend proceeding with the next steps while the water is warming up ;-)

We're going to use the peel and the juice of the lemons. First wash and peel the lemons. We want only the yellow-colored part of the peel, so remove the white from the inside of the peels (the white part of the peel would otherwise give an unpleasant bitter taste!). Then, juice the lemons, and keep the juice for a few steps later.

Peel the fresh ginger root, and cut in thin slices

By now, the sugar should be completely dissolved in the boiling water. Turn of the cooking fire, so the water stops boiling. Add the lemon peels and ginger slices to the hot water, and stir for a little while. Allow the water to cool to about room temperature.

We're basically making tea from the lemon peels and the ginger slices. You'll notice the water will get a pretty yellow color and a very lemony smell from the lemon peels.

optional

* Add a tablespoon of maple syrup

* Throw your berries of choice, and mint leaves in a sieve. Put the sieve in the cooking pot. crush the berries with a spoon. Leave the sieve with the mint leaves and crushed berries in the pot for about 15 minutes. After that, remove the sieve and dispose of its remaining content.

When the water has reached room temperature, add the lemon juice and the yeast to the mixture. Now leave your brew at room temperature for about 24 hours, and stir gently once in a while. Now the yeast will get started eating away the dissolved sugar, and turn it into CO2.

I decant my brew into a 2L glass jar, and put it onto the kitchen table with a piece of kitchen paper on top (so it can breathe, but doesn't catch dust). Everytime I walk by the jar, I stir it gently. Note that the room temperature has quite an influence on the speed the process; you may not have to wait for 24 hours on a hot day, or it may take two days when it's cold.

After a while, your brew will noticeably start bubbling. Now it is time to sift out the lemon peels and ginger slices, and bottle your lemonade. Now leave the bottles closed for about 24 hours at room temperature to allow the bubble-making process to continue.

It is important that you use bottles that allow for building up a bit pressure, because we want a bit of the CO2 gas to get trapped in the lemonade, and make it fizzy. I use flip-top bottles, but recycled soda pop bottles would do perfectly fine!

Now, your lemonade is ready for consumption!

I recommend putting your bottles in the fridge for a while before serving. Keep your lemonade in a cool place to disable the yeast; otherwise in a short while all sugar will be converted to CO2, resulting in a loss of favorable flavor, and unpleasantly squirting bottles.