What is the Ginger Beer Plant?

A Ginger Beer Plant (GBP) is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that is used to ferment ginger beer, a carbonated soft drink made from ginger, sugar, and water. The GBP is composed of lactobacilli bacteria and wild yeasts, and has been used for centuries to make ginger beer and other fermented drinks.

The GBP looks like a gelatinous mass or a small clump of whitish-yellow fibres. To make ginger beer with a GBP, you add the GBP to a mixture of ginger, sugar, and water, and allow it to ferment for several days to create a naturally carbonated drink.

While the use of a GBP to make ginger beer has been largely replaced commercially in modern times by forced carbonation of a sugary, gingery mixtures, some people still enjoy making ginger beer with a GBP for its unique flavour and for fun.

Other Information About Ginger Beer Plant

The Ginger Beer Plant (GBP) has been around for hundreds of years. Nobody is sure where it came from though there are many hypotheses. One likely one is that it grew in a mixture of raw sugar from sugar cane and ginger mixed together to make a drink. The Ginger Beer Plant is made up of two organisms, a yeast Saccharomyces florentinus (Saccharomyces pyriformis), and the bacterium Lactobacillus hilgardii (Brevibacterium vermiforme). The lactobacillus is very common in nature but the yeast is quite rare in the wild adding to the Ginger Beer Plant's mystery.

The Ginger Beer Plant was studied extensively by a British Botanist Harry Marshall Ward in the 1800's at Kew in West London. It was ward who, after much research and many failed experiments discovered which of the many organisms found in various samples of Ginger Beer Plant were responsible or vital for the formation of the 'blobs'.

History of The Ginger Beer Plant

The Ginger Beer Plant first opened it's doors in 2007 with the website gingerbeerplant.biz in 2008 it had a site change to www.gingerbeerplant.net I initially just wanted to make the Ginger Beer Plant (GBP) available as it had previously gone into obscurity. A group of customers of the Yahoo group "Ginger Beer Plant" had been on a mission to find this elusive culture. Their search was in vain until one member found the German culture bank "DSMZ".

A member opted to buy the culture which cost $100 so they all chipped in. He received just a tiny bit of culture and set to trying to grow it.

I was given a sample and I was quickly hooked. My first sample got lost, literally in the yeast at the bottom of the jar so the guy who'd given it to me offered me another. He had loads of jars of different cultures all bubbling away in his 'library of cultures. I thought it was great, having such an array of fascinating organisms all giving off that heady aroma of yeast alcohol. I just had sourdough, Kombucha.

I was extra careful with this batch and managed to keep it going for a while. I'd already had some suspicions about cross contamination so got another batch from of pure stock from the culture bank and just in time as shortly afterwards they stopped offering the GBP as a culture together, now only offering the two organisms separtely for a total €260.

Between then and November 2009 I became very busy at work and had little time to be sharing the GBP, I was posting out just a few packets a week and the time involved running the site just didn't seem worth it. Besides the GBP group was doing well and plenty of people were sharing the culture. A guy called Will took my last bit that I had to share, he was very keen and wanted to know everything. I told him everything I knew about the stuff and I thought it was in safe hands. Shortly after giving him my last batch he posted to the GBP group on Yahoo proclaiming he'd 'created a new strain'. The longer serving members were very bemused by this. 'How have you "created" a new strain?' He proudly told us he'd combined the batch I'd given him with one he'd bought from eBay. Well, at the time, and still today, there are plenty of people selling Water Kefir Grains and Tibi that have been fed ginger and passing them off as a GBP. So, I quanteened my GBP in a safe place and didn't touch it. I got my partner to buy a batch of his 'new strain' and I tested it. I also got a known sample of Water Kefir Grains to compare. It grew as fast as the Water Kefir Grains, was a similar size, appearance and the resulting brew was very similar to the Water Kefir Grains' brew. It was obvious then that he'd got a mixture of two cultures. The yeast and bacteria in Water Kefir Grains are very similar to those in the GBP and need exactly the same conditions. Since the Water Kefir Grains are much more vigorous mixing the two would result in the Water Kefir Grains taking over, dominating the GBP. I got rid of it, sterilised all my equipment and kitchen and retrieved my GBP.

All I'd learned of the GBP and it's loss suddenly made sense. It hadn't been lost as such, it had been mixed with the newly introduced Water Kefir Grains and the two, looking very similar, had been confused for the same thing. The GBP had been overtaken by the Water Kefir Grains in homes where the two had been cultured together. In the mid 20'th century people didn't understand hygiene as we do today and even today many people think just putting a meter between their various cultures is enough to keep them separate. They don't understand that the distance is not important if they don't sterilise everything including the curious little hands of children, and the feet of passing fruit flies; obviously this is not possible in a domestic environment.

So, it was clear to me that I couldn't stop offering the GBP, I set to building up my stock again and did my best to make people aware of Will's, Retro Cultures' mistake and why it was vital to keep my GBP available free from the mixing of other cultures. A lot of damage had already been done though and as time went on it became more obvious that a lot of people were passing around Retro Culture's hybrid culture as genuine Ginger Beer Plant. I'm still going, though it is harder and harder every year. People sharing on Facebook has taken a huge chunk of my orders. One person in particular was very open, after getting my GBP from me that she was intending sharing it and had a lot of people waiting, she even showed me pictures of all the packets of GBP she already had packaged and labeled along with all her other cultures including Water Kefir Grains and Tibi.

I now have another big UK rival claiming to have brought his culture back with him from Germany. He says his culture is Organic too, yet he contacted me and told me he was getting a regular supply from a company in the US that doesn't claim to be organic and that has lots of other cultures as does he. He wanted me to supply him instead. I refused as why would I support that lie? He also claims that the culture is lab tested, which, of course implies that it's tested for being genuine Ginger Beer Plant. It isn't. On his Amazon site you'll see it was tested only for Salmonella and E.coli, basically for common food contaminants NOT for it's validity as actual Ginger Beer Plant.

It has never been more vital that I keep going. If I don't keep going the GBP will be gone. It's ironic that in my 12 year anniversary year orders dropped to a low I haven't seen since the time of Retro Cultures. I had just 1 or 2 orders a week again. Hardly enough to pay for the sugar I use every week. I've had to reduce my culture to a fraction of what it was I hope people don't forget why keeping the Ginger Beer Plant separate is so important if we want to continue to have it available.

Now since the pandemic I'm lucky to get 1 order a week. I genuinely don't think I'll be able to afford to pay for the site when it comes up for renewal as I was made redundant from my main job. I've had to let my charity page go as I couldn't afford the costs. I can't genuinely claim to be a 'business' with 1 order a week but, as long as I can I will keep this up. If it weren't for my partner's money coming in I wouldn't have been able to replace my borken computer with the one I'm typing this on.

Please support the Ginger Beer Plant by supporting 'The Ginger Beer Plant'. Please get your culture from me so you can be sure you get Ginger Beer Plant so it will be available for many more Anniversaries to come.

Harry Marshall Ward

Ward in 1895 (41 years old)

Harry Marshall Ward (21 March 1854 – 26 August 1906) was a botanist, mycologist, and plant pathologist. He was born in Hereford, England, the eldest child of Francis and Mary Marshall Ward, educated at Lincoln Cathedral school. c. 1864 and at the South Kensington Science and Art Department under Thomas Henry Huxley in 1874. Owens College, Manchester, in 1875, and Christ's College, Cambridge, from 1876 to 1879.

At Cambridge, Ward got a B. A. with First Class hon's in the Natural Sciences Tripos. Ward's education at Cambridge was funded by fellow student from South Kensington, Louis Lucas. He also studied with leading German botanists Julius von Sachs and Anton de Bary who at the time were way ahead of the English in the field of experimental botany.

From early 1880 until 1882, Ward was employed by the British government in Ceylon to study coffee rust disease. His detailed and methodical work established his reputation as a plant pathologist and physiologist.

In 1883 Ward returned to Owens College as an assistant lecturer, and married Selina Mary Kingdom.

In 1885 shortly after the birth of his son he was appointed Professor of botany at the Royal Indian engineering college (Forestry department) at Cooper's hill, now part of Brunel University. He moved with his new family into a house at Englefield Green.

He became Fellow of the Linnaean Society in 1886, Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1887. Ginger Beer Plant was brought to his attention. Fellow of the Royal Society in 1889. He was president of the British Mycological Society in 1900 and 1901.

In 1895 he became Professor of Botany at Cambridge University.

Meanwhile he was gaining more honours and positions on committees while still researching, teaching, and administrating. All this work took its toll on his health. He was weakened further by diabetes. He died on 26 August 1906 aged only 52.

He is buried in the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Marriage of equals

28 September 2002 NewScientist.com news service Gail Vines

Summer was once the time to quaff ginger beer, served up in brown stone bottles. All over the British Isles people relished its frothy, fizzy gingery tang, enhanced by an alcohol content that temperance campaigners warned could rival that of strong London stout. Best of all it was virtually free: you could make it at home with just a bit of sugar, ginger, water and a ginger-beer "plant".

No wonder, then, that this plant was a family heirloom, passed from mother to daughter and father to son. But it wasn't your typical green, leafy kind of plant. This was a sloppy mess of whitish, gelatinous lumps that typically lived in a jam jar. Exactly what this stuff was, nobody had a clue. It worked, and that was enough.

But in 1887, a 33-year-old botanist called Harry Marshall Ward became curious. When a famous friend at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, gave him a specimen, he was hooked. Unwittingly, he had embarked on a Herculean labour. "Had I known how long and difficult a task I had set myself," he later remarked, "the attempt would possibly have been abandoned at an early date."

EVERYONE knew that Harry Ward could never resist a challenge. On a visit to his old mentor, the director of Kew Gardens, Ward couldn't help but notice the bottle of ginger-beer plant, perched on a shelf in the director's study. "There is a thing you have to worry out," suggested William Thistleton Dyer, knowing all too well of Ward's penchant for botanical mysteries.

From now on Ward devoted every hour he could snatch from his job - teaching young men about to enter the Indian Forest Service - to his hunt for the mysterious agent that transformed sweet, gingery water into a tasty and potent pint.

Ward had always been passionate about botany. While attending the revolutionary courses run by Darwin's champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, he had famously fainted at his microscope from sheer over-excitement. After his time with Huxley in London, Ward won a place to read natural sciences at Cambridge, and blossomed.

He went on to become a brilliant exponent of the "new botany". Radical ideas were spreading from mainland Europe (Excluding Switzerland), and he and his friends wanted to learn about how plants worked, not just how they were classified. He went on to become one of the great names of the day. Before he died aged just 52, reputedly of overwork, he pioneered the study of both symbiosis and pathology, investigating how plants and microorganisms live together as friend as well as foe.

Ward's first major study, as botanist to the colonial government of Ceylon, is now a classic of plant pathology. In 1879, the coffee plantations of Ceylon were threatened with extinction by a leaf disease. The disease was coffee rust, and for the next two years Ward worked out the life cycle of the rust fungus and showed how leaving belts of natural forest between the coffee plantations could prevent the spread of its spores. This was a brilliant piece of scientific detection, but it came too late. As the epidemic wiped out vast mono-cultures of coffee across the British colonies, the "mother country" quietly returned to drinking tea.

And ginger beer of course. Back in England and inspired by the "plant" from Kew, Ward set out to amass a comprehensive collection of specimens. Soon his laboratory shelves were crowded with jars of ginger-beer plants from all over the country, and even from North America.

To this day, no one has ever worked out where the first ginger-beer plants came from. Rumour had it that soldiers had returned from the Crimean War with the stuff, but Ward said that was sheer speculation. "The whole question as to whence it was first derived, in fact, is enshrouded in mystery," he concluded. But he did solve the ultimate mystery, that of the plant's real nature. His meticulous analyses revealed it to be a fascinating alliance of cooperating microorganisms.

Everything turned on his scrupulous technique. Over the years, he had established nearly 2000 separate cultures, some of which he had to keep going for months or even years, as he struggled to separate and cultivate each microorganism in a pure state.

To avoid contamination, he first ensured that every flask, beaker tube, funnel, watch glass and microscope slide was absolutely sterile. All apparatus was baked or boiled for several hours. Next, he concocted an extensive menu of nutrient broths to cater for every taste. The fussiest fungi dined on best bouillon made from lean beefsteak, finely chopped and soaked overnight in distilled water, then filtered and boiled.

Even then, some microorganisms failed to thrive or resisted purification, and for these cases Ward perfected a way of isolating a single yeast cell in a "hanging drop" secured to a microscope slide, thus guaranteeing the culture's purity while he tracked down its identity.

His diligence paid off, for when he published his results in 1892 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , no one questioned his astonishing announcement. Buried in this scholarly text is a biological bombshell. The ginger-beer plant, Ward proclaimed, was a new kind of organism - a "composite body", consisting of dozens of microorganisms living amicably together in a symbiotic lump. Not all of these microbes helped in making the beer. The majority Ward regarded as opportunistic interlopers. They turned up by chance, and hung around for the free lunch.

But two organisms were present in every plant sampled, and seemed to be vital to the production of ginger beer. One was a fungus, a new species of yeast he called Saccharomyces pyriformis . The other was a bacterium, which he named Bacterium vermiforme , and is now called Brevibacterium vermiforme.

Ward reckoned that these two microbes had developed a symbiotic relationship, to their mutual benefit. He couldn't be sure of the biochemical details, but he guessed that the bacterium consumed the yeast's waste products, while the yeast benefited from their removal. Together, the two produced the essential ingredients of traditional ginger beer: carbon dioxide and alcohol.

The conclusive proof came when Ward made perfect ginger beer in his laboratory, using his own plant, reconstituted from his pure cultures of the right yeast and bacterium.

So the ginger-beer plant was a bona fide "dual organism", rather like lichens. Everything pointed to a true symbiosis. For instance, when Ward tried to feed the bacteria with dead or feeble yeast cells, the experiments failed. The plant emerged only from a marriage of equals, which needed time: it took several days for the partners to find and embrace one another. No one could have predicted that the crude home brew of country folk would reveal a phenomenon new to science - what Ward called "symbiotic fermentation".

It was landmark research. Yet as the study of symbiosis fell out of fashion, Ward's work sank into obscurity. Vindication of a sort came half a century later, when a research team decided to investigate Kefir . Ward had also been interested in this yogurt-like drink, made from fermented milk, and popular in the Caucasus mountains of southern Russia and Georgia, and he had begun to investigate its secrets.

Legend has it that the Prophet Muhammad first gave Kefir curds to Christians living near Mount Elbrus with strict instructions never to give them away. All the same, Kefir curds did eventually turn up in a laboratory where, just as Ward had predicted, investigators identified a symbiotic collaboration between yeast and bacteria.

Years after Ward's pioneering work, Soviet researchers discovered a further instance of symbiotic fermentation. A yeast and a bacterium apparently cooperate to form the "tea fungus" or Kombucha that thrives on sweetened tea. After a few days, the liquid acquires a pleasant acidity and a peculiar fruity taste that eastern Europeans once regarded as ideal for gastric upsets.

Indeed, not so long ago, even ordinary bread owed its distinctive taste and consistency to microbial liaisons. The traditional baker's yeast or "barm" passed from baker to baker was found in the 1950s to consist not only of the conventional baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae but at least one other yeast, as well as one or more bacterial species. By cooperating, this microbial syndicate fermented a greater number of carbohydrates than any of the various microbial components alone. The bread that resulted was surely like nothing you can get today.

Today's commercial ginger beer is also much altered, purged of both its alcohol and its symbiotic liaisons. It is possible that Ward's own lovingly reconstituted ginger-beer plant survived into the 1940s. Max Walters, now 82, says he made and drank the stuff in the Botany School at Cambridge just after the Second World War. But no one knows what happened to it after that. Thankfully the ginger beer plant is still available here.