How to make home made ginger ale

Ginger ale is a delicious and refreshing carbonated beverage, one of my favorite drinks. Unfortunately I live in an area that has a really poor selection of ginger ale, there only being one available brand, and then only sometimes which is why I went about developing my own recipe for ginger ale. The recipe I've developed has gone through several cycles of development until I really liked the outcome. It's a relatively easy recipe that takes around 35 minutes to make, using easy to find ingredients.

Here's what you need.

1/2 Lemon
1/2 Lime
2 & 2/3 Table Spoons Fresh Ginger
180g / 3/4 Cup Sugar
355ml / 1 & 1/2 Cup Water
4 Cloves
1 Small Cinnamon Stick

You can substitute the sugar for agave syrup, honey or even use artificial sweeteners. If you do substitute sugar with artificial sweetener my advice would be to mix it in at the very end.

Begin by shredding half of your ginger (1 table spoon and a third, which is a tea spoon) using the fine side of a shredder.

Pour the water and the sugar into a pot and turn on the heat. Cut the cinnamon stick into thirds (it will probably splinter, which is fine). Put a pan on the stove under high heat and roast the cloves and the cinnamon on it for a few minutes until they start to change color, then dump them along with the ginger into the sugar water.

Let the mixture simmer for 15 minutes with the lid off.

Once the mixture has simmered for 15 minutes, take the lemon and lime halves and squeeze their juice into the mixture.

Once you have squeezed the lemon and lime, take the shredder and shred some of the rind of each citrus fruit directly into the pot. Make sure not to go too deep into the skin of the lemon and lime, we only want the surface level. If you go too deep you'll get some of the pith which is very bitter. Also make sure that no seeds make it into the mixture as they tend to be bitter as well.

Let the mixture simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

Once the mixture has simmered for another 10 minutes, shred the rest of the ginger and add it to the ginger ale mixture.

Let simmer for another 5 minutes.

Once the 5 minutes are up, strain the liquid using a fine meshed strainer. You'll be left with a golden ginger ale concentrate that you can use 1 to 4 (1 part ginger ale concentrate to 4 parts water).

This ginger ale recipe will make around 800ml of ginger ale.