Thread by @krishashok

Cucumbers 🥒 need only 48 hours to lactoferment into perfect pickles. Use slightly more salt because molds seem to love cucumber.

400 ml water, 20g sugar and 20g chopped ginger (with the peel). Feed sugar and ginger every 24 hours for about a week to get a Gingerbug, that is the ginger equivalent of a Sourdough starter. You can then use it to make any mildly alcoholic, carbonated beverage

Boil orange, sweet lime and lime peels, crushed coriander, cinnamon, brown sugar, chopped ginger in water, bring to room temp, add nutmeg, citrus juices and gingerbug. Bottle & let ferment for 2-3 days to get...homemade cola

2 days seems to have been enough for the perfect balance of fizz, sourness and mild alcohol production (1.5 bottles have already been demolished)

Pineapple ginger soda. 1 entire pineapple juiced + enough water to make 1.9L (for 2 1L bottles), 100g strained gingerbug, 100g sugar. 24 hours fermentation.

Watermelon ginger ale. 1 smallish watermelon + enough water to make 1.9L, 100g strained gingerbug and 100g sugar. The microbes ate almost all the sugar in 24 hours of fermentation! Crisp, fizzy, boozy with a watermelon aftertaste

Hard Apple Cider with what is proving to be a rather versatile gingerbug starter. I’m going to let it ferment for 24 more hours though. In contrast, pineapple and watermelon took just 24 hours to get to the perfect balance of fizz, sour & booze

If you make your own naturally fermented fizzy drinks, you will never go back to enjoying artificially carbonated fizzy drinks. Even if you ignore the alcohol, just the depth of flavour from fermentation reactions cannot be matched by pumping in CO2 into fruit juice.

Coconut water, sugar and gingerbug starter for 24-48 hours (depending on starter strength and temperature) for homemade kallu

Here's the complete cheatsheet for all the homemade gingerbug based fizzy ales I've tried out so far.