Ginger beer - Gemberbier (Suriname)

Ingredients                                         Preparations

1	300g	ginger	1	Grate the ginger, cut open the vanilla pods and scrape out the marrow.
2	2	vanilla pods	2	Put all ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook until all the sugar is dissolved.
3	4 L	water	3	Allow to cool and place in refrigerator overnight.
4	2 kg	sugar	4	Strain the ginger beer the next day with a clean cloth.
5	10	cloves	5	Keep it in the refrigerator.
6	4	lemons	6	Serve ginger beer diluted with water and lots of ice.

Andreas found some vanilla pods on the market. Did you know that vanilla is the second most expensive spice after saffron? Here in Entebbe a pod goes for 500 shillings, which is currently worth about 0.25 Euros.

Vanilla is an orchid native to Mexico and could only be cultivated in places like Uganda, when Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave who lived on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, discovered that the plant could be hand pollinated in 1841. So this blog entry is dedicated to Edmond for being such a smart kid, and of course Ramon Beuk who is the author of this recipe.

Having bought the vanilla along with the usual week's shopping, Andreas decided to look for a recipe on how to convert it into his favorite drink - beer. Luckily the boss, Hans, had left a copy of the June 2011 zin  magazine on the dining room table before he left for The Netherlands.

For the non-Dutch speakers among us, you could either get the dictionary out and look up any words you do not understand, or try using the wonders of modern technology:

1. Scan the page, and make sure you enable OCR recognition. OCR stands for optical character recognition.
2. The scan of the recipe above can now be copy-pasted into other applications. Go to http://translate.google.com/ and let some computer in the US translate the text for you. Not bad at all!
3. There may be some mistakes in the OCR if your scan settings were not detailed enough, so you may need to do some manual corrections for Google to give you the correct english translation.

So now that we have a recipe we can read, we find out that kruidnagels actually means cloves and not some sort of herbal nails. The next step is to disturb Hans on his holiday in sunny Portugal and find out where he put those kruidnagels!

After some time....

Get the ingredients together.
Let's start with a modest quantity... (2kg sugar???)

Convert everything into a much larger surface area/volume ratio...

...and bring to the boil until all the brown sugar has dissolved.
Then let everything cool down, and let it rest in the fridge over night.

The next day (Sat 17 Sept 2011)...
Find a cloth. If it is currently being used to clean the floor,
we recommend using the coffee filter...
You will also need to find a suitable container to hold the Gemberbier.

 

Keep the Gemberbier nice and cool in the fridge.

Note how the bottle of Bombay Sapphire is multi-tasking
as an alternative light source.

 

Perfect for a refreshing drink on a summer's day,

or every other evening during Entebbe's power cuts...