Ginger Beer Three Ways

No, I haven't been getting up to bizarre hijinks with Caribbean beverages. I just made three different types of ginger beer while testing for Vegan in the Sun.

The first one I tried was unfermented. It was basically just ginger and boiling water, sweetened with homemade simple syrup. I didn't add much syrup, so it's pretty much like drinking straight up ginger. Here it is, sitting and steaming:

The next one was fermented for a few days and had lime in it. Woah. It had a real kick to it (so much of a kick that my friends and I aren't sure if it turned into alcohol yet or not). As you can see, it was much darker than the unfermented. Here it is, twenty hours into the fermentation process, all fizzy and bubbly and getting its ferment on:

After taking that picture, I stirred the ginger beer and once it settled, it started fizzing again pretty much instantly (you can sort of see the fizzies above the top reflection of the right light bulb):

The last kind, and my personal favorite, was fermented with some flour mixed in with the yeast. It was more mild than the original fermented ginger beer, but still had more of a kick than the first one I tried.

Making these drinks was a bit of a project (depending on the kind, they took two days to nearly a week to be ready), but worth it, since I'd never had ginger beer that wasn't like a soda before. And I'd never fermented anything before. And I very rarely make drinks (aside from tea). The only other beverage I can think of that I've made is Terry's horchata from Viva Vegan! (which I also recommend). I guess recipe testing inspires me to make things that seem more complicated than I would normally bother doing for myself.