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Ginger Ale Making Workshop April 8 at Garfield Farm Museum
CAMPTON HILLS, IL - Garfield Farm Museum will host lecture, demonstration and hands-on activity about Ginger Ale Making. Come Sunday, April 8th at 3 pm to learn how to make a probiotic ginger ale with museum volunteer Debbie Rock. The presentation will cover the how ginger ale is made and the benefits of consuming it. Participants need to bring a plastic bottle with a cap and a lidded jar so the beverage they produce can be taken home.
Mineral waters that were naturally carbonated were sought after in an era of no real medicine as a way to deal with human ailments. In the latter 1700s, it was discovered that water left sitting above a fermenting vat of beer had acquired both flavor and effervescence or bubbliness. This led to carbonating water and mixing it with medicines and flavorings in the ongoing desperate attempt to treat disease before the era of modern medicine. Thus what today is a multi-billion dollar worldwide soft drink industry, was once an attempt to cure all sorts of ills. Home remedies where individual families had favorite recipes to attempt to treat various diseases made home manufacture of tonics and potions a typical part of domestic life. This class comes out of such tradition and now is a fun process to create a novelty soft drink.
Ginger beer existed more than 100 years before the development of the non-fermented ginger ale of the mid 1800s. An Irish version and later a Canadian style were developed – the first was golden with a stronger ginger taste but the Canadian paler drink with a milder ginger flavor has dominated modern preferences.
The lecture and class are $20 per person. Reservations can be made by contacting the museum at (630) 584-8485 or info@garfieldfarm.org. Garfield Farm Museum is a 375 acre historically intact former 1840’s prairie farmstead and teamster inn that volunteers and donors are preserving as an 1840’s living history museum. The museum is located 5 miles west of Geneva, Illinois off ILL Route 38 on Garfield Road. |