Dad’s Ginger Beer

My first memory of ginger beer is of three-quart apothecary jars set out on the front stoop to steep on the scorching cement on hot summer days. Ginger beer was brewed only on blisteringly hot summer days, when the New York City heat was so brutal it could rival Trinidad’s. It was a cloudy, pale yellow liquid swirling with a mass of shredded ginger and protruding vanilla beans that looked to me like big black worms. Dad described this concoction to me by saying that it was “something like g