
The following is a guest post from Howling Hill. If you’re interested in guest posting on The Greenists, e-mail Courtney at thegreenists dot com for details.
Back when I worked as an EMT in Massachusetts I had this one partner named Gary. He was an awesome partner to have. He was motivated, smart, educated, and funny as hell.
While there may be a fairly large Jamaican population in Lynn (or, at least there was a decade ago. I don’t know if there is one now) there weren’t a lot of places for Jamaicans to shop for Jamaican food nor were there many Jamaican restaurants. There was, however, this one place in Lynn which Gary used to go to regularly, when he was missing home something fierce. At the time I was a vegetarian so I didn’t sample too much of the cuisine because it was mostly meat based. I did try goat though (it wasn’t bad) and ginger beer. I came away from our partnership with a lifelong love of ginger beer.
Ginger beer gave me such a hassle though. Finding it in white suburban Boston wasn’t easy and when I did it, it was expensive — finding it in rural New Hampshire was damned near impossible. Certainly I found Goya but it didn’t fit my criteria to ingest. That is, as I got more ingredient savvy I realized how unhealthy ginger beer could be: lots of sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It became a treat I didn’t get very often because of the expense and the HFCS.
Over the last decade I’ve tried to find ginger beer without HFCS and, while I was successful, they tasted awful or, worse, bland. Ginger beer, you see, needs to burn on the way down. It’s the best that way! So the organic ones I found were either to bland or just yucky and the non-organic were filled with HFCS. I was sad.
I was sad until last weekend when Melissa stopped by and brought some ginger beer. It’s good. It burns.* It has no HFCS and, AND it’s local. How could I get any luckier? Maine Root is the name. It’s a microbrew, if you will, that uses organic cane sweetener and bio-diesel to deliver its product. How effing cool is that?
So if you love ginger beer (or root beer, or sarsaparilla, or orange, or lemon lime, or blueberry) give Maine Root your business. If your local place doesn’t carry it ask them to or buy online. You palate won’t be sorry!
*It could burn a smidge more! Just a smidge though.
Howling Hill blogs from central New Hampshire where she dreams of living on a farm raising meat,vegetables, and fruit to feed the community. She had no idea to be progressive she had to become very regressive. She’s becoming adept at knitting, canning, and generally be more greenly self sufficient.