I saw a press report that ginger beer will be barred from a new tv series based on Enid Blytons Famous Five. How can this be? Well, I dont suppose that a world-wide audience will necessarily understand that this is not an alcoholic drink.
There was once a real fad for making your own ginger beer at home. For this you needed a ginger beer plant. This was some kind of yeast or fungus which you put in a jam jar half full of water & left on a window sill. It had to be fed regularly with, I think, ground ginger and sugar. After a week or so you strained off the liquid, mixed it with water & sealed it in glass bottles. One half of the plant could then be discarded or given to friends, & the whole process gone through again with the other half.
We used to store our bottles of ginger beer in a small stone outhouse. One winter panic set in at the sound of repeated explosions coming from the garden. When it seemed safe to investigate it transpired that the ginger beer had frozen & the subsequent expansion had caused the bottles to explode. Come to think of it there must have been some kind of fermentation going on, so at least some alcohol was being produced.
As an even smaller child I used to wonder how my Methodist & strictly teetotal grandma could be responsible for making something called herb beer, which I used to love. Even at that tender age I wondered if the adults were being strictly truthful when they said it was non alcoholic, though I reasoned that they certainly wouldnt give it to me if it were. Regretfully, it was only made in summer. Even more regretfully, I never thought to ask for the recipe. It tasted very like Dandelion & Burdock, though not nearly as sweet as the commercial versions available today.
In some ways however, my absolutely most very favourite drink as a small child was soda water. This used to come from the grocers in a very heavy glass syphon with a silver coloured top. It cost the huge sum of 1 shilling & threepence, though most of that was returnable deposit. My Nan always had a syphon in the larder for medicinal purposes, namely her indigestion. I was, very occasionally, allowed a small quantity as a treat. I regret to say that I was not entirely above sneaking in to the larder for a stolen splash when I thought I could get away with it.
As I grew older & rationing came to an end, fizzy drinks became more widely available. There were even lorries which used to drive around, much as ice cream vans do today, delivering bottles to your door - though you still had to pay a deposit on each. There was definitely however a sense that only the more common sort of family would stoop to giving their children such large quantities of fizzy pop.
