Showing posts with label Ginger beer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ginger beer. Show all posts

Sunday, 24 April 2016

Still In Limbo. Enjoying Limbo. And Ginger Beer.

English: Bottle used for J. Ladd's ginger beer...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I realised things were getting pretty desperate when I started growing a ginger beer plant. I used to have one of these as a kid, gifted to me by someone who hated me.

I used to sell the resulting ginger beer at school. It was mildly alcoholic and popular. Things got out of hand when the school market became saturated and I had to run for it before the teachers found out why their classes were suddenly filled with a mild ethanol and ginger miasma and their lessons greeted with enthusiasm that quickly slipped into grinning torpor.

Ginger beer plants are a curse. You grow one, it makes ginger beer and you end up with two. So you make twice as much ginger beer. It's a mad experiment in exponential escalation a la the wheat and chessboard problem. A couple of weeks later your house is filled with bubbling carboys and near-exploding bottles, cloudy brews and the undeniably rich yeasty reek of fermentation. Your garage is a cellar and your garden has become a storage zone. So you start to give away ginger beer plants. To people you hate.

Trying to grow a ginger beer plant in Sharjah is probably a) illegal and certainly b) pointless. I wouldn't even have contemplated it except I have acquired some small ceramic-stoppered bottles and feel guilty about throwing such pretty little things away. Oh, and because I hadn't got a writing project on the go, I was suffering from serious terminal purposelessness.

Now I have two such projects. They're jostling for my attention. One is a recounting of Gerald Lynch's early history in Civil War Beirut. The other I can't even talk to you about. Seriously.

The ginger beer plant's been chucked out. I wasn't really serious about making ginger beer.

Honestly, ossifer.

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