From C. W. Hart
You point out that today’s ginger beer is much altered and purged of its “symbiotic liaisons” (28 September, p 50). Back in the 1950s, when I did fieldwork in Jamaica, Desnoes & Geddes made a wonderful brew that I remember as slightly cloudy with 1 or 2 millimetres of crud, junk or what have you in the bottom of each bottle.
Today Desnoes & Geddes still makes a slightly cloudy ginger beer that it exports to the US, but it no longer has the mysterious and intriguing bottom-dwelling crud that used to fascinate me. Could this detritus have been the ginger beer plant you speak of?
Falls Church, Virginia, US
