The Proper Red Stuff In A Ginger Beer Bottle

[The Grave Maurice]

Wasn't it Ginger beer in the famous legal case (I think off the top of my head it was Stephenson vs Donohue) that redefined contract law?

Close, Tecs. It was Donoghue v. Stevenson, the famous "snail in the ginger beer bottle" case that established negligence as a sub-head of tort law. You must have gone to law school to know about that.

[Tecs]

Close, Tecs. It was Donoghue v. Stevenson, the famous "snail in the ginger beer bottle" case that established negligence as a sub-head of tort law. You must have gone to law school to know about that.

Thanks for the compliment!

No, I didn't go to law school, (although funny you should mention it, it's something I do consider every year. Any advice welcome if you did!)

I actually heard it from Vincent Burke, famous local (Liverpool/North West) crimewriter. You may not have heard of him, but if not try to get some of his cd's or tapes. He has a very distinctive voice and tells great stories, the Wallace case, JTR et al. He passed away last year sadly but I always remember the snail in the bottle case that he read out on the radio.

I'm afraid, to my wife's disdain, I have one of those memories that can remember individual facts like (nearly) Donoghue vs Stevenson, but come back from the shops with a jar of coffee having been asked to go for a loaf.

And I walked back forgetting that I drove there.

And left the baby in the pram at the cashpoint.


Regards,

[Natalie Severn]

And I walked back forgetting that I drove there

I "ve done that more than once---it sounds like the North West must breed em like us!
Today I had a whole load of vouchers from Smiths and Boots and Tescoes--all to do with Christmas I think.I kept trying to sort out one from the other at the till with a long queue of people behind me and my change and everything starting to fall on the floor. I gave up in Tescoes when the girl said go and choose a bottle of wine and take it to the cigarette counter where your vouchers will be worth double-I saw there was another queue there twice as long so I swept up my vouchers from the counter and floor and made haste to the exit where the wind blew my umbrella inside out -thank God for the peace of the internet and my books.

[sleekviper]

Thank you Tecs. The ginger beer bottles are somewhat of a mystery to me. It took special kilns to make them, which required a vast amount of heat. So between the raw materials to make the bottles, the heat source to fire them, and this being a time before automation, so were filled and sealed by hand, I would have thought that they would have been somewhat of a luxury item for those barely a step from living in the streets. Maybe not, never took the time to see what the cost would have been.

[Sally]

Ginger Beer

I think ginger beer was common, though I don't know what the cost would have been.

Ginger beer then wasn't ginger beer now, though - it would have been alcoholic - up to about 11-12%. Its very easy to make - you just need ginger - root ginger, sugar and water. You leave it for a few days and it ferments by itself, making a ginger beer 'plant'. This will make ginger beer in, from memory, about 6 weeks? I used to make it with my parents as a kid.

I'd forgotten about that - old age! - or I would have mentioned it sooner. You can speed up the fermentation process with yeast, but the plant will ferment by itself. You can flavour it with lemon, etc.

So ginger beer would have been cheap to make as a drink, not sure about the bottle cost, but I'm guessing not expensive.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make, clumsily, is that ginger beer would have been alcohol in the 19th Century, which I think puts a slightly different spin on it.

I'm fascinated by the idea that the ginger might have thinned blood though! The alcohol in the beverage would presumably have had a preservative effect, although I imagine that would have been slight - does anybody know?

Fascinating subject!

Best regards

Sally

[Sally]

Correction..

British Excise decreed in 1852 that Ginger Beer should have an alcohol content no higher than 2% - I think this would have been about the same as malt beer. That's the British Government for you - spoiling all the fun

I also wonder if it would have been sold in earthenware bottles, not glass? I have a vague memory of hearing this somewhere. I don't know whether that would have been cheaper than glass?

[sleekviper]

Ginger beer was still in pottery in 1888, but glass was either soon to begin, or just had began I think. Think the clay was more expensive, thus the shift to glass.

[Jane Coram]

HI All,

Here's everything you could possibly every want to know about Victorian ginger-beer. Don't say I haven't warned you!

Ginger-beer wasn't a luxury item. It was sold everywhere and was very cheap. Ginger-beer makers had a surprisingly quick turn over in their merchandise, and probably a surprisingly quick turn over in their customers as well. At a penny a bottle it was affordable to most, and in the summer months particularly the vendors always did a roaring trade — so roaring in fact that even the 24 hours it took to make a batch was too long a time and emergency measures were taken to speed things up by adding twice the amount of yeast.

The ingredients for making ginger-beer were cheap and fairly grim:

9 gallons of water (usually spring water from one of the pumps); 3lb. of ginger, lemon-acid, essence of cloves; yeast; and 3lb. of raw sugar.

The basic method for making the ginger-beer was to boil the ginger in the water and then adding the rest of the ingredients, the yeast being the last ingredient introduced. It was then left for 24 hours, and was ready for bottling.

The main problem with making the ginger-beer was that it needed a large amount of water boiled, and most of the poor didn’t have a pot to their name, and certainly not a pot large enough to accommodate that amount of water. The ginger-beer sellers, with considerable ingenuity, found a neat solution — the laundry copper. Once mum had finished washing the dirty linen, out came the shirts and in went the ginger-beer, although hopefully they changed the water first.

Ginger-beer making and selling was a very lucrative business, and the smaller street traders had fierce competition from the larger wholesale manufacturers, who had vast vats and steam power to produce their goods. One of the largest manufacturers for the street-trade was near Ratcliffe Highway, and another in the Commercial Road. Although much cleaner and more sanitary than boiling up the gingerbeer along with grandma’s smalls, the ginger-beer produced in the big factories was often contaminated with lead from the vats.

Quite a few of the street-sellers obtained their stock of ginger-beer directly from the manufacturers, because they could have it on credit and pay for it once it was sold. Because the trade was so lucrative, there were many illicit traders on the streets selling ‘Playhouse ginger-beer’ which was the cheaper version of the beverage. These ‘Jiggers’ used the left over molasses from breweries to make the mixture ferment instead of yeast and quite a few of them added a little oil of vitriol to the mixture to make it alcoholic. This was a good way for Granny to get merry and retain her respectability by blaming her giddiness on too much sun.

Apart from the very hot days in the parks, the best time and place for the sale of ginger-beer was near the closed pubs on a Sunday morning. After a good Saturday night on the beer the best remedy for a hangover was gingerbeer.

One can’t help but wonder whether that accounts for the ginger-beer bottles found in Mary Kelly’s room — although if it was laced with vitriol, it might have been a cheap way for her to get drunk.

From the mid 1800s onwards ginger-beer ‘fountains’ became quite common on the streets, almost entirely owned by the large manufacturers. The contraption had two pumps with brass handles and the drink served in glasses which were reasonably clean; something of a novelty for the Victorian ginger-beer drinker, that was used to dirty earthenware bottles that had to be returned to the vendor to get their halfpenny deposit back. The advantage of the fountain was that the mixture didn’t have to be fermented as air was pumped into the liquid directly.

“The harder you pumps,” said one man who had worked a fountain, “the frothier it comes; and though it seems to fill a big glass — and the glass ain’t so big for holding as it looks — let it settle, and there’s only a quarter of a pint.”

There was another kind of ginger-beer, which was called ‘a small acid tiff’ which was sold out of barrels at street stalls at ½d. a glass. The ingredients sound more like the requisites for a floor cleaner rather than a drink: tartaric or other acid, alkali (soda), lump sugar, and yeast. As quite a few people seemed to have drunk it, it must have tasted reasonably palatable, and it probably gave their digestive system a thorough scouring for good measure.

There you go. You can wake up again now. Lol.

Much love

Janie

xxxxx

[protohistorian]

ummmmm......I've had this taste in my mouth before! Dave

[Sally]

To Jane

Hi Jane

Thank you for posting that account of ginger beer, fascinating. It really took only 24 hours to make a batch? I remembered it as longer, but time takes longer when you're a kid, I suppose.

I quite fancy some now!

Best regards

Sally

[Rubyretro]

When I read Jane's first recipe I was quite into making some -by the end I had quite changed my mind !

[Jane Coram]

Hi Sally,

It's quite probable that they knew tricks to get the ginger-beer to ferment faster because they needed to make some quick money. Most of the information for that comes from contemporary accounts written by social commentators in the 1860s - 1880s, found on victorian.london.org in the food and drink section.

The idea of leaving a deposit on a bottle was still going strong when I was a kid (and still might be, I suppose). It was very common practice in the East End right up until the 1960s/70s to collect the bottles and use them as a form of savings, so that when you were really short of money, you could take the bottles back and get enough for a bit of dinner. I can't even remember the number of times I heard 'Take the bottles back and get us a loaf,' from Nan.

I daresay Mary did the same on occasion. I'm pretty certain that McCarthy would have sold ginger beer.

Hugs

Janie

xxxxxx

[Jane Coram]

Hi Rubytro,

There are some good gingerbeer recipes around. Don't take any notice of the one give above. I'll pm you one.

Hugs

Janie

xxxxx

[Sally]

Hi Jane - thanks, I'll have a look at that website. Ginger beer is easy to make, as I remember. I might have a go!

Ginger is very good for the digestion I believe. That's my excuse.

I remember getting money back for bottles as well, my Nan used to save them for us so we could take them back to the shop. 10p a bottle. It was quite lucrative!

Best regards

Sally

[sleekviper]

Thanks Jane! How much deposit is on a penny bottle? I am in the States, so a penny is as low as it goes.