The Legend of the Ginger Beer Plant
I wrote this for a class paper and can’t stop talking about it! Basically, there’s this fermentation starter called the ginger beer plant with really mysterious origins.
What is ginger beer, anyway?
Ginger beer is a fermented drink that can be made using a starter (usually brewer’s yeast, a ginger bug, or a ginger beer plant starter). The starter is added to a mixture of ginger and sugar water to produce an alcoholic, carbonated, gingery beverage.
Okay, so what’s weird about the ginger beer plant?
The ginger beer plant is the most interesting starter. It is a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of yeasts and bacteria) that looks like gelatinous grains, and is appropriately nicknamed “Yeast Barnacles”. The culture is generally thought to be a composite of Saccharomyces florentinus yeast and Lactobacillus hilgardii bacterium, but the exact composition is yet to be determined. It’s considered a “lost ferment”. Here’s a picture:
So, how do we still have access to it, if it’s a “lost ferment”?
Ginger Beer Plant was first mentioned in The Ginger-Beer Plant, and the Organisms Composing it: A Contribution to the Study of Fermentation-Yeasts and Bacteria, a paper by Henry Ward in 1892. More than 100 years later, an online forum became curious about the ginger beer plant, recalling drinking it in their youth. However, the members’ attempts to recreate it were unsuccessful, until they found that the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Braunschweig, Germany had saved a sample of the SCOBY in their microbiology bank. Unfortunately, the Institute refused to release the sample to the public, insisting on only communicating with educational institutions. Fortunately, Raj Apte, a UC Berkeley EECS (Electrical Engineering/Computer Science) graduate was able to request a small part of their sample, since he was affiliated with a research group. He grew the sample using Henry Ward’s research, and was successful in his effort. However, there are still doubts as to whether or not the German sample is an authentic ginger beer plant SCOBY.
Nevertheless, this strain is now the generally distributed Ginger Beer Plant, and it’s actually available for purchase by everyday consumers.
Sources:
Ward, H. Marshall. “The Ginger-Beer Plant, and the Organisms Composing It: A Contribution to the Study of Fermentation-Yeasts and Bacteria.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, vol. 183, 1892, pp. 125–197. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/91748. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
https://www.yemoos.com/pages/ginger-beer-plant-guide
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2012-piracy/strange-brew
