Q&A for How to Make Ginger Ale

Sodium benzoate is a preservative. Due to the fact that you're dealing with active yeast, you don't want to kill the microorganisms. When the mixture is completely pressurized, you can slow the reaction by placing the ginger ale in the fridge. Assuming you're not mass producing a lot of ginger ale, no sodium benzoate should be used.

After only 24 hours? Negligible. There are a number of factors that affect how quickly fermentation takes place, notably the ambient room temperature where the fermentation is occurring, the type of yeast being used, and the sugar content of the liquid being fermented. Even if all of these factors are optimized for maximum alcohol content (which they won't be if you're following the above recipe), it's still going to take at least a week to a week and a half to get any measurable amount of alcohol by volume, and several weeks to achieve the maximum alcohol content possible. This recipe is for a soft drink, not a hard ginger beer.

Yeast is a bacteria which consumes sugars and excretes alcohol. In presence of sugar, the following reaction occurs: C12H22O11 + H2O → C6H12O6 + C6H12O6

Yes, you can use glass. Just keep checking every hour until it reaches a level of carbonation you like.

No, but it is compulsory to use some kind of carbonated water, or you'd just have a flat ginger tea.

If you live in the USA or other place where the legal drinking age is 21, then no, it would be illegal to drink it. Follow the legal drinking age for the country in which you live.

Feel free to adjust the ingredients to taste! Don't add extra yeast or less sugar, because that would affect your fermentation, but you can make all kinds, even without lemon or ginger! The sky's the limit, just be careful to sterilize all equipment.

No. The process of drying ginger affects its chemical composition and would affect the flavor of the final product.

You can use lime, grapefruit, tangerine, pomelo. For more flavor, add also the zest. If you add raspberries instead of citruses, it will bring the taste to another interesting level.

As long as the yeast is capable of fermenting that sugar, you can. Small scale, try the sugar (+water) + some yeast and if you see signs of fermentation (bubbles), then you can use that sugar.