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Riding high on their last glowing review, @hakanoahandmade sent me a little something else to try and they were already off to a good start as soon as I saw the contents of the package. Everyone knows sh1teater is a sucker for ginger beer. “not too sweet” is displayed proudly on the front of their label, another +1 from me.
Remember that shit your neighbor used to make in little plastic bottles? The ginger beer with the sultana in it to indicate when it was ready? That stuff that would go off like a bottle bomb if you didn’t keep or handle them correctly? Or worse, wouldn’t go ‘off’ at all? This is the same stuff Hakanoa makes, except after years of trial and error, they have managed to iron the bugs out.
Where some mass produced ginger beer soft drinks are still using yeasts like Philistines, Hakanoa uses actual wild lactobacilli culture to ferment their ginger beer. This is the shit that is naturally found on many fruits and vegetable matter, including ginger root and given the right conditions will ferment the sugars out of the ginger naturally.
Before even pressing the bottle to my lips, I could smell the tangy bite of ginger from an arms length away and the first mouthful was tangy, spicy and bubbly, with sweet/tart refreshing aftertaste that almost defies description. It took me hours to find the right word for it: “super-quenchy” – it was written on the bottle right in front of my nose. Looks like years of trial and error has also given Hakanoa the perfect word to describe its own ginger beer. If you are interested, their website has a really interesting ‘our story’ page telling all about the journey to produce this amazing drink.
They also sent me a couple of bottles of the lime & chilli flavour which is the same awesomeness but has a bit more zing for those of you whose quenching needs know no bounds.
This is exactly the sort of shit that I like, delicious, not too sweet and very different from other ginger drinks on the market. This is the real shit, done the hard way, not some shitty mass produced ginger syrup shitdrink.
Fer-meant to be – 9/10
