I started making my first ginger bug a week ago and it finally produced a bubble on the 7 th day!
I’m planning to brew a big batch of ginger beer in a 5 gallon carboy and I’m need 7 cups ginger bug in the recipe.
My question is, can I speed up increasing my ginger bug quantity by giving it a big feed?
I usually feed once a day with 2 tbsp water 2 tbsp ginger and 1 tbsp cane sugar. Thank you very much.
What it sounds like you need is a called a stepped starter approach. Apparently, this is less stressful for the yeast. Though a ginger bug is technically a SCOBY.
Bubbles happens when your yeast is eating the sugar, and that creates the co2 (the bubbles).
Feeding bigger quantities = more food for yeast. But yeast can only work so much, you can't make it work faster, but you can make it work all the time.
Feeding daily, I would assume would be the same as feeding all at once. All you're doing is making sure your yeast has food all the time to continue to work. If you do this in a big hit, it just means it will have a lot more food to work on.
You can't speed up yeast working, but you can make it work all the time, and not rest. When you feed it all at once, you're just making yeast work 24/7, instead of doing it daily.
You are correctly staggering your feeds as adding too much sugar at once can stress the yeast and bacteria in your SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast) or bug.
I don't know the size of your current bug, but I would suggest you could increase the feeding rate, ie do what you are doing now but daily rather than every 2 days. BUT, I would wait till it is happily bubbling before ramping up the feeding, as if the bug is not chewing up the sugars you provide then it will stress it out and slow down the growth you are looking for.
Also, adding a little lemon/orange juice can help as it lowers the pH slightly which the bacteria will prefer, and provides easily accessible nutrients which can help in the initial rapid growth phase for yeast and bacteria. Also, if you are taking the lid of for feeding every day, after feeding, give it a good shake to get some oxygen dissolved into the solution, as both yeast and bacteria need oxygen in their growth pahses to allow them to make sterols in the cellular membranes.
As your bug grows and its capacity for metabolism increases you can provide more nutrients with each feed.
