| Recipe |
| • Ginger Beer |
Woe to the thirsty soul who, only familiar with ginger ale, picks up a ginger beer. Pity this poor sap, this rube, who thinks that he can glug-glug ginger beer down his gullet as he would his Canada Dry or Schweppes, but instead finds himself attacked by the ginger bite, as if a tiny, ginger-fierce dog was running circles in his mouth, tearing up the carpet, barking up his nose, and slobbering down his throat.
Oh, I have been this sap.
My introduction to ginger beer was a brown bottle of the Goya Jamaican-style stuff that was sitting in the back of my liquor cabinet. I couldn't remember when I had purchased it; all I knew was that I wanted something carbonated and non-alcoholic to drink with the veggie burger I had just made on a hot summer day. So I put some ice in a glass, poured in the ginger beer, and took a big swig. I was shocked when my mouth wasn't hit with the cloying taste of ginger ale, but rather a mix between a rain of needles and gingery sexual arousal. If there had been anything, anything clogging my sinuses, it was gone.
This incident happened last summer, and as someone who loves food and drink, I was embarrassed that it took me so long to realize the substantial difference between ginger ale and ginger beer. With a little research, I discovered that ginger beer was older than ginger ale (the beer is traceable back to the 1700s, while the ale first showed up in the 1850s), and I started to think of ginger beer like mothers in velour tracksuits or the IBM corporation: something that's still around and has some sort of relevance, but nobody really pays attention to. I also discovered that both the ale and beer originated in Europe, even though ginger beer is now primarily considered a Caribbean drink. This is why super-spicy ginger beer is “Jamaican style,” and why the most famous ginger-beer cocktail, the Dark and Stormy, is ginger beer and a few squeezes of lime, mixed with another common product of the Caribbean, dark rum — most specifically, Gosling’s Black Seal Rum.
Speaking of the Dark and Stormy: My embarrassment for mixing up the ale and beer subsided in the fall when I ate lunch at one of Esquire's top restaurants of 2007. It was a hoity-toity establishment, one that should know how to mix a proper drink, but the bartender made our Dark and Stormies with meek ol' ginger ale. When the waiter told us that that's how the restaurant always makes the cocktail, one of my lunch mates replied that's why the drink “tasted like crap.” This vitriol makes more sense when you understand that I was lunching with Cocktail People. Cocktail People are the only ones who seem to care much about ginger beer these days, and often because of the Dark and Stormy. When you Google ginger beer recipes, the top hits come from cocktail bloggers, and both specifically mention the Dark and Stormy. Reviews of commercially produced ginger beers pepper other cocktail blogs.
So if February isn't too late to make predictions for 2009, I have one: Ginger beer is going to bubble to the top this year. I have a couple of reasons for predicting this. First of all: cocktails are still hot right now, and where mixologists go, magazine readers who want to impress their friends at parties will follow. My second reason has to do with ginger beer's sultry, frothy cousin, root beer. Root beer got some press last year, reminding people that this whole gourmet soda trend doesn't just mean fancy new flavors like lavender; it also means updated versions of classic sodas. And when Eric Asimov ran a root beer tasting in the New York Times last summer, he pointed out a number of interesting qualities about root beer — that nobody chugs it, that it goes so well in floats, that it can have a polarizing flavor — all things that also apply to fierce, feisty ginger beer as well.
Hell, I bet we'll even see recipes for more ginger-beer cocktails beyond the Dark and Stormy.
Meg Favreau is a writer and comedian living in Philadelphia. She blogs at www.megfavreau.com.
| Ginger Beer, adapted from Paul Clarke |
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Supplies
Fill a bucket with hot water and 2 tablespoons of bleach. Add the bottles and the funnel and let sit. When working with yeast, it's always best to sterilize your equipment, otherwise you might get some nasty buggers growing in your soda. While the bottles sterilize, add the water, ginger, and bay leaf to a pot. Bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat, and simmer. After ½ hour to 45 minutes, add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Add the lemon or lime here if you're adding it. Remove the pot from the heat, strain out the ginger pieces and bay leaf, and let the ginger syrup cool until tepid. Add the champagne yeast and stir. Take the bottles out of the bleach solution and rinse. Then, using the funnel, pour equal amounts of the ginger syrup into the two bottles. Top with filtered water, leaving 2 inches at the top of each bottle. Store the bottles in a warm, dark place, and check regularly. The yeast can take anywhere between 24 hours and 4 days to grow depending on the room’s temperature. (Don't let them sit around for too long unrefrigerated — the bottles can explode. I let mine sit in a lidded storage container to be safe.) When you give the bottles a squeeze and they feel completely firm, move them to the fridge. Let the bottles sit in the fridge for 1-2 weeks, then open and enjoy. |
This ginger beer recipe is adapted from Paul Clarke, who runs the Cocktail Chronicles blog. Paul's original recipe was for a syrup that you mixed with sparkling water to make it carbonated; my version ferments with yeast. I consider this to be sort of a ginger beer light — it's not as strong as Jamaican-style ginger beer, but it has a much fresher flavor and more depth than ginger ale.Photos by Meg Favreau, "DIY" photograph by John and Eliza Forder/Getty Images, "Pantry" photograph by Áslaug Snorradóttir.
