Ginger ale, unadulterated, also took its place among the temperance beverages of Britain and the United States as the powerful social and religious forces moving against the consumption of alcohol gathered momentum on both sides of the Atlantic in the second half of the nineteenth century. Soft-drink manufacturers, serving licensed and temperance outlets alike, generally maintained a diplomatic neutrality in the fierce battles over the drink trade, at the same time expressing occasional ironic amusement at the reformers’ description of their nonalcoholic favorites by reference to the names of the very drinks they sought to defeat.
Hop ales, hop beers, dandelion stout:All these and more endeavored to provide alternatives to the workingman’s beer, whereas football stout and football punch aimed to attract young men from the sports field. One winter punch was advertised as “the best non-alcoholic substitute for brandy,” but in what respect was unspecified. Many such nonalcoholic beverages were fermented, but as one turn-of-the-century writer cryptically noted, “some of them are not fermented and others are not non-alcoholic.” Uproar occasionally ensued when analysis revealed that a temperance drink contained as much, if not more, alcohol than the product it sought to supersede.
Further up the market, a full range of nonalcoholic champagnes - sweetened, flavored, carbonated drinks, usually of high quality - resembled champagne in their presentation but not their origins, while nonalcoholic fruit wines, drunk as such or diluted, imitated the syrupy consistency of liqueurs. The. American soda fountain, too, flourished under the temperance movement, offering an ever-greater selection of flavors and blends of flavors. This vast increase in choice was the result not only of demand but of the growth of specialist essence houses that supplied the soft-drink industry with flavorings and with careful advice on how best to use them. As a result, essences even came to be used in the manufacture of ginger beer, but the result, although of more uniform consistency, was generally held to lack a certain something of the brewed original.
By then, however, much of the ginger beer available in England was of poor quality, hence this lament from the 1880s: “ Times were’ when ginger beer was ginger beer, as the name implies; but now tis generally something quite different” (Good 1880). The writer, Joseph Goold (1880), went on to deplore the widely varying standards by which the drink was being made, in most of which ginger was “conspicuous by its absence,” the product having become too often simply another sort of lemonade.
It was also toward the end of the nineteenth century that saccharin became available as an alternative sweetener to sugar in soft drinks. Discovered in 1879, the intensely sweet coal-tar derivative was patented for commercial manufacture in 1885, and early enthusiasts predicted a great future for it in soft-drink manufacture. In practice, although it became a particularly useful sweetener of drinks for diabetics (and later for low-calorie or diet drinks), when it was used in standard products critics considered its no match for the “body” or the palatability given by sugar, which over the years had come to be specially refined for soft-drink manufacture.
World History
