This page is fully or partially automatically translated.
Make an appointment with
So that you can make an appointment, the calendar will open in a new tab on the personal profile of your contact person.
Create an onsite appointment with
So that you can make an onsite appointment, the appointment request will open in a new tab.
Ginger Beer - fermented, but beer?
A friend of the night is slowly creeping into the light of day: Ginger Beer didn't play any role at all on German non-alcoholic shelves until a few years ago. It wasn't here. Nowhere. With the Moscow Mule, a cocktail made of vodka and ginger beer, the drink is now creeping over the bar into the daily scene. It's found in supermarkets and is drunk here and there, and more and more often straight, i.e. without alcohol and not "merely" as a filler.
But wait, so what exactly are we drinking here? Where does it come from and how is it made? We'll tell you. Here and now: everything about ginger beer.
The history of ginger beer
Ginger Beer is an English invention, said to have been first brewed in Yorkshire, England, in the mid-18th century. It was there that people had access to the pungent tuber that makes ginger beer: Ginger. England had the upper hand in the global spice trade.
Ginger is one of the oldest spices of all, more than 5000 years old. Its healing properties and good taste were first discovered in Southeast Asia, but found its way to the West as early as the times of the Roman Empire. For a long time, the trade in ginger was controlled by the Middle East, it was scarce and expensive - and therefore, of course, terribly noble. From the discovery of the New World in the 15th century, more and more ginger also came to Europe from the Caribbean and Africa.
So in Yorkshire they came up with the idea of making the best of the good root: Beer! (Whereby: beer? More on that later). They mixed ginger, sugar, water and, if desired, a little lemon and let the good drink ferment. As soon as it began to bubble (and tasted slightly alcoholic), it was ready for consumption.
[Ginger Beer is fermented but not brewed ]Beer or not beer, that is the question here
This rough recipe above already gives a hint: Beer as we understand it is not ginger beer. Nor was it in the past. Neither barley nor other grains are used as starch suppliers, nor are brewing techniques applied. If it has to be compared with a common drink, then ginger beer perhaps works more according to the production principle of cider.
However, ginger beer used to be - and still is for some producers - fermented, usually using a mix of yeasts and bacteria, mainly Saccharomyces florentinus (formerly S. pyriformis) and the Lactobacillus hilgardii (formerly Brevibacterium vermiforme). The traditional fermentation methods used in ginger beer production tend to produce a certain amount of alcohol (even if only a little).
Some modern manufacturers still do this today - but most of them offer non-alcoholic drinks under the name "Ginger Beer", which are carbonated with CO2.
Beer or not beer is quite the question in Germany
So far we all agree that ginger beer is not beer. Oops, but wait a minute! A beer that is NOT a beer? Is that allowed? In the Beer Republic?
When Thomas Henry was the first German manufacturer to launch a ginger beer in 2010, the Schutzverband gegen Unwesen in der Wirtschaft e.V. (Association for the Prevention of Unfair Competition in Business) immediately came to the rescue. Unfair competition, they said! In 2011, Thomas Henry was banned from using the name Ginger Beer by the Berlin Regional Court. From then on, Thomas Henry wrote "Spicy Ginger" on its bottles, while competitor Schweppes (Krombacher) sneaked around the thorny issue with "Ginger B.". In 2017, however, the Munich Regional Court overturned the ruling. Now all producers here are allowed to write "Ginger Beer" on their ginger beer.
[Somehow nobody was interested in the fact that ginger ale is not beer either ]And another question: Ginger Beer or Ginger Ale?
Long before ginger beer became a thing in this country, there was already ginger ale. Ale, beer, both not beer (and then again they are) - so somehow the same? Not really. Certainly, the two drinks are somewhat related, twice carbonated drinks with a ginger flavour. Nevertheless, there are differences:
Ginger ale is lemonade flavoured with ginger extract, while ginger beer is (in the original) a fermented drink with real ginger root. The distinction, however, is not always clear-cut, and some ginger ale nowadays also bears the word "beer" on the label, because it has such a following.
Ginger ale has always been non-alcoholic, it is a lemonade, "soda" in Anglo-Saxon. By all accounts, ginger ale originated in Ireland and was discovered in 1907 by a Canadian entrepreneur named John McLaughlin, who popularised it as "Canada Dry".
Above all, ginger ale and ginger beer differ in taste: the ginger is not even clearly recognisable in the much sweeter ginger ale, depending on the manufacturer (the sugar content is also usually much higher). Ginger beer, on the other hand, burns sharply and warms - that's how clear the ginger is here. Unlike ginger ale, ginger beer is also usually cloudy.
Cocktails got the ginger beer bandwagon rolling, you can find the recipe for a Christmas spicy "Moskow Mule" at the end of this postMarket overview
The Moscow Mule was the beginning. After it came the Gin Mule, or often and gladly the "Munich Mule", in the bars. Together, the Mules pushed ginger beer. And the producers behind the Mules are also pushing: The Munich gin producer The Duke, for example, launched its own canned ginger beer not long ago. It complements a still very manageable group of German ginger beers: in addition to Thomas Henry and Schweppes, Aqua Monaco also has a ginger beer on the market. The Australian ginger beer producer Bundaberg is represented in Germany by Karlsberg Brauerei.
Recipe Moscow Mule
Ingredients:
5 cl vodka
1 cl lime juice
10–12 cl ginger beer
Preparation:
1. fill glass with ice cubes
2. add vodka and lime
3. fill with ginger beer, stir briefly
