The first properly warm weekend of the year is usually when I start one. May, sometimes earlier if April has been generous. You have to think ahead for this, because a ginger beer plant takes a week to do its work and the drink itself wants a few more days in the bottle to find its fizz. By the time it's ready, the garden has come into itself and someone is standing at the back door looking for something cold.

This is the old way. Not the brown stuff in the supermarket, which is fine in its way but has nothing to do with fermentation. A proper ginger beer plant is a small living thing that lives in a jar on the counter and asks you to feed it every morning with a teaspoon of ginger and a teaspoon of sugar. It bubbles. It smells yeasty and sharp and faintly medicinal in a way that makes you trust it. For a week it asks very little of you, and at the end of the week it gives you something genuinely alive.

The finished drink is hot with ginger, cloudy, unpasteurised, and lively against your teeth in a way the commercial sort never manages. Poured over ice on a warm afternoon with a slice of lemon, it's the kind of thing that makes you wonder why you ever bought a bottle of anything. I wrote it down in the notebook years ago and the note just says: the plant, again, Saturday. Some things don't need more detail than that.

One word of warning, because I'd be a bad friend if I didn't say it. This is a real ferment, which means the yeast is making its own carbonation in the bottle, which means you need proper swing-top bottles designed for the job and you need to ease the pressure every day or two during the second ferment. Respect the yeast. It works hard for you, but it doesn't know when to stop.