Aldi's ginger beer actually tastes like ginger

Posted on Jun 24, 2021

Ginger ale is a good drink. Everybody likes it. It has a place in everybody’s hearts as a perfect cocktail mixer, a medicinal remedy, and a good drink in its own right. But did you know that there are multiple kinds of ginger ale? Not many people do and content themselves drinking dry ginger ale all the time. Yes, your normal Schweppes or Canada Dry is only the entry level of ginger ale! I bet you haven’t even tried a real, old-style golden ginger ale, have you? Go get yourself a can of Vernor’s and try it. We’ll wait.

Okay, now that you’re back from that ginger-induced blackout period, it’s good, right? It’s really good, and it tastes much more gingery than the Pepsi and Coke owned swill you’re used to. So imagine being someone who ACTUALLY likes the taste of ginger sodas and having to deal with only that junk on the shelves. Yeah, it’s hard. I know, it’s so, so hard. You can stop crying for us now.

But there might be hope on the horizon. Aldi has started selling their own brand of ginger beer, and since we’re dedicated Aldi shoppers, we couldn’t be more excited. Will it be the gingery kick we’ve been missing from our lives?

Aldi’s primary gimmick is similar to Trader Joe’s, because they’re both owned by the same company (this is a more complicated statement than you’d think. It involves cigarettes). This ginger beer is under the “Summit” label that produces a lot of other Aldi soft drinks, including the “Gridlock” energy drink that only costs a dollar. This means the ginger beer could be any real-life brand of ginger beer, repackaged for Aldi’s private label. This is an extremely common tactic for most grocery store brands. Those generic Fruit Circles you’re eating for breakfast might just be real Froot Loops packed up in a different box! 

The Aldi ginger beer being very likely rebottled is not a condemnation of the ginger beer, nor is it a condemnation of whatever brand they might be stealing. We love generic brands, please don’t get us wrong. Nine times out of ten we will pick generic over name-brand and enjoy the generic more. This is why we shop at Aldi, after all!

But actually circling back around to the ginger beer now, what more can be said except that this stuff is really good? Most ginger ales for sale really do not taste much like ginger. They taste like very sweet carbonated Beverage. I don’t even know how to describe the flavor of it beyond “sugar water”. Heck, even a lot of bottled dark ginger ales don’t taste very gingery. This stuff? It tasted like ginger. It tasted strongly of ginger. It’s the one, singular thing that ginger ale is supposed to taste like, and we’re surprised and pleased that this actually tastes like ginger. Can you believe it?

These cans come in packs of six, packaged in the turtle-murdering plastic rings that I really would have thought we’d have progressed past years ago. Always make sure to snip these things open when you throw them away. They can seriously fuck up wildlife that get their heads stuck in them. Why not just package these in cardboard boxes anyway? Was it too expensive to do a run for a six-pack box? 

God, we love shopping at Aldi. We really love it. There are so many things there that you can’t find anywhere else. Well, you can, but Aldi’s stuff is so much cheaper and better you don’t need any reason to shop anywhere else. Literally the only reason that we go to any other grocery store is to get stuff we explicitly can’t find at Aldi, like name-brand snacks and bulk frozen food. And even then, it feels like a chore. Shopping at Aldi is an experience. Go shop at Aldi. Oh god, have we joined a cult?

Categories: food

Tagged: aldi ginger ale ginger beer soda

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