Old Jamaican Ginger Beer, Ting Jamaica

Old Jamaican Ginger Beer, Ting Jamaica

If I'd known it was going to be as good as it is,
I'd've been more careful making the picture.

I think I can see God.
Or at least a guy with a beard.
Oh wait, that's just me.

Don't let the boring, out-of-focus bottle fool you, this stuff is incredible. Forget all about that molly-coddling, vegan-appeasing, sugar-free Reeds stuff, this is the real thing. How the hell can you have a Jamaican type soda without SUGAR. Jamaica IS sugar. Of course, this particular bottle was made in Canada, but no doubt under Jamaican overseers.

This stuff is sweet and burney, like crystallized ginger. In fact, this is exactly like liquid crystallized ginger. It even has that flat cardboard taste that ginger gets when it isn't stir fried. But good cardboard. It's so sugary that the residue on my lips tastes sweet when I lick it off. Normally the stuff I lick off my lips is a little more salty, and shameful.

Towards the middle of the bottle the sweet shock has worn off and the hot is building up. The heat lingers in the back of my throat, like syphilis after a night in prison. But in a good way. A happy way. A "let's try that again and this time I won't struggle" way.

Ingredients:

Filtered water
Sugar
Natural and artificial ginger flavors
Gum arabic
Citric acid
Sodium Benzoate
Carbon dioxide

This is the first drink I've seen that lists water and carbon dioxide separately.

We can learn from this stuff too, the bottle says:

Ginger (Zingiber officinale) A perennial herb of the ginger family considered to be a native of tropical Asia, the tuberous rootstock has been used as a spice and in medicine from very early times as an aromatic stimulant.

That's one big sentence. A big old sentence worthy of this rocking beverage. Properly sugared up I could write sentences that long but this stuff is so great, I couldn't possibly do it justice, no matter how long my run-on sentence.



Of course, it isn't a Bundaberg, but what ever could be?