Tony Cenicola/The New York Times; Styling by Toby Cecchini
The dark ’n’ stormy has become a cult highball due to a felicitous combination of its no-fault simplicity and the balance of its exotic, headstrong ingredients, each of which is perfectly suited to the common goal: reviving the flagging, heat-pummeled constitution. It is simply dark rum — very dark rum — with ginger beer and some fresh lime. The rich spirit is shaken awake by the buoyant piquancy of the ginger beer, while the lime slashes through the sweetness of both.
The drink has its roots in Bermuda, and emigrated up the Atlantic seaboard with the sailing set. Goslings has a rather sniffy and debatable lock on the recipe, having in fact trademarked its version, even going to the point of threatening with the specter of litigation anyone who might suggest concocting one with another rum. I like Goslings just fine. It’s delicious rum (the little-heralded 151 proof is my preference), and being the dark rum from Bermuda, it is unquestionably synonymous with the dark ‘n’ stormy. But I have to say, at the risk of sounding libelous, that any number of dark rums are interchangeably lovely in this drink, including Coruba, Zaya, Cruzan’s Blackstrap and, my favorite, the Lemon Hart 151 from Guyana.
In fact, to worry about what rum goes into a dark ’n’ stormy is to miss the point; the real game changer in this cocktail is the ginger beer. In the years I’ve been quietly obsessed with this drink, I’ve tried every commercially available ginger beer I could get my hands on. They’re all too tame. You cannot find one that has the requisite punch to sing in this highball and not get washed out by the baritone of black rum — well, O.K., one, but good luck acquiring it. To get the full aromatic flush and fizzy burn of fresh ginger, you have to make your own. Once you do, and find how easy it is, you’ll step up to the Platonic ideal of the dark ’n’ stormy, the first sip placing your bare feet up on the gunwales, bobbing over a Caribbean sunset.
There are two levels of seriousness in the homemade ginger beer graduate school. I’ve long resided firmly on the less serious and far simpler rung, whereupon one makes a thick syrup in a 1:1 ratio from fresh ginger juice and some type of raw sugar, like demerara or turbinado, and incorporates that into the drink along with soda water. Juicing the ginger requires either a bit of patience, using a Microplane or other fine hand grater and then squeezing the pulp through a tea strainer, or a bit of coin, with an extraction juicer, like an Omega 8 or a Champion. From there, however, this method is a cakewalk, and the resulting drink is leagues better than anything you can get from a bottled ginger beer. Until recently, I thought this was the only way to fly. I hereby officially admit I was wrong. Or at least, not right enough.
The more advanced method is to actually brew your own ginger beer the way it has been done for centuries. I’ve long heard about people doing this: practically every household in England and America had its own recipe 150 years ago. But to me it has always seemed like one of those things for indefatigable types who sew their own shoes and build airplanes from kits; I’m sure it’s rewarding and all, but who wants to mess with all that yeast and vapor locks and sterilized carboys and who knows what all?
Still, I began to feel guilty about never having tried real homemade ginger beer. So, in selfless service to this column, I vowed to take on the onerous task and set to wading through the dozens of recipes online to cobble together one that would be as simple as possible. It still seemed kind of scary; while emphasizing how easy it is, many home brewers warned about not using glass bottles, as they routinely explode. Yikes.
In the end, I was amazed to find how simple it is. There’s no sterilization needed, and the method is forgiving — you can actually play about with the levels and ingredients. Moreover, the resulting ginger beer blows anything else you’ve ever had straight out of contention. Upon opening my first bottle, I had one of those “whoa” moments before I even got it to my lips. You can tell it’s serious, alive. A bartender friend who tested the first batch with me found it “too in-your-face gingery.” Bull’s-eye.
The more serious and historically rigorous method is to first cultivate a kind of mother, called a ginger beer plant, which is a symbiotic glob of lactobacillus and yeast with which you can brew endless batches, much like a sourdough starter. The easier, lazy man’s method — which, it goes without saying, was my method — is to take a pinch of packaged yeast and something acidic for the yeast to thrive in (like lemon or lime juice or cream of tartar) along with some sugar syrup and grated ginger, lob it all in a plastic bottle of distilled or spring water, shake it up and stash it somewhere dark and warm for two days. It’s remarkably simple, but here’s a chemistry professor to take you through it anyway.
It sets to fermenting straight away, blowing up the bottle with gas (which you may have to let escape a couple of times before the yeast has fully consumed the sugar). As a result, it does contain the slightest bit of alcohol: less than 1 percent, similar to many soft drinks. After two days you stop the fermentation by chilling it in the fridge. That’s it. The result is a cloudy, dry mixer with pinprick carbonation and a straight-up goose of fresh ginger. That is thrilling come dark ’n’ stormy hour, not just for its authenticity and superior flavor but also because you can now brag about your homemade ginger beer. I want to try the version with a cultivated ginger beer plant next, which some arbiters say results in a slightly more complex drink, and incorporate different spices like allspice, vanilla or hibiscus. But first I have to finish building my bamboo sea catamaran.
Homemade Ginger Beer
2 ounces freshly grated ginger
4 ounces lemon juice
6 ounces simple syrup
1/8 teaspoon commercial baker’s, brewer’s or Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast
20 ounces non-chlorinated water (filtered, distilled or spring)
1 to 4 grams cream of tartar (not necessary, but traditional, to help the yeast and bacteria thrive).
1. Take a 1.5-liter plastic bottle of spring water and empty it into a clean pitcher. Use some of it to make simple syrup by stirring 1/2 pound sugar into 1 cup hot water until fully dissolved.
2. In a large measuring cup, mix all ingredients and stir well. Funnel back into the plastic bottle and cap tightly. Store in a warm, dark place for 24 to 48 hours. (I put mine inside a box, to contain it if it should blow.) The top of the bottle will expand and become tight. Check it and very slowly release the pressure if it’s looking groaningly tight. Some people ferment it with no top, or with the top on loosely, to allow gas to escape. I suppose if you wanted to get fancy you could spend $1.50 on a fermentation lock and stop worrying about it. If the temperature is quite warm, above 80F, a single day may be sufficient. The longer you let it ferment, the drier the final mix will be.
3. After 48 hours, refrigerate it to stop the fermentation. Once chilled, you can strain out the pulp and dead yeast, which will have made a sediment on the bottom. Makes 1 liter and will keep up to a week in the refrigerator.
Dark ’n’ Stormy
2 ounces dark rum
1/2 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
1/2 ounce simple syrup, or to taste
4-6 ounces fresh ginger beer.
Build the drink in a highball glass filled with ice, adjusting for sweetness and tartness. Depending on when you stop the fermentation of the ginger beer, it may be fully dry or still retain enough sweetness that additional simple syrup is unnecessary. Garnish with a wedge of lime. Serves 1.
