The Best Ginger Beers for Cocktails & 2 Recipes

Ginger beer boasts a long history, with its genesis attributed to the Caribbean or England, depending on which origin story you’re following. Alcohol free, it’s a great mixer, especially for low or non alcoholic drinks. Though it’s been imbibed for a few centuries, give or take, ginger beer’s popularity in cocktails really only dates back only to the 1940s, with the advent of the Moscow Mule. This cocktail’s popularity has waxed and waned over the years a bit, but it consistently remains a perennial favorite on “most popular cocktail” lists and surveys.

Ginger Beer Then and Now

“Wars have literally been fought over ginger, and ginger’s been a huge deal in the Western Hemisphere for over 500 years, and it goes back for thousands of years in the Eastern Hemisphere,” says Jordan Silbert, founder and CEO of Q Mixers. “It’s a flavor that’s spicy, earthy and complex, and it’s something that everyone loves.”

Equally enduring is the demand for ginger beer, and according to a report published by Grand View Research the global ginger beer market size was estimated at $4.38 billion in 2021 and was expected to reach $4.7 billion last year. “Ginger is a great match for alcohol in that it has a distinct flavor that doesn’t dominate it but provides some backbone support for whatever you want to mix it with,” Silbert says.

The choice of ginger beer - even a decade ago - was sometimes limited, with many of the offerings seeming similar, and most of them containing as much as 50 grams of sugar per serving. “Ginger beers can run very, very sweet, with some that are not very hot and are just sweet, and some of them become kind of generic,” says Mary Pellettieri, co-founder and president of Top Note Tonic and Beverage Mixers.

But today, there’s nothing generic, overly sweet or boring about the craft ginger beers that are available. Today’s modern, craft ginger beer usually uses real ginger root or ginger root extracts, contains less sugar and no corn syrup and often uses different sweeteners to bring out the properties of ginger. Some of them bring the heat, and some of them bring in different sweeteners and flavors that accentuate the beauty of real ginger.

Recommended Ginger Beers

Fever-Tree

Ginger Beer, Ginger Ale, Refreshingly Light Ginger Beer and Blood Orange Ginger Beer

Though Fever-Tree started with its revolutionary tonic water, it soon revised the space of ginger mixers with its debut of ginger beer (a 2022 Double Gold winner in the NY International Spirits Competition), ginger ale and then refreshingly light ginger beer. It continues its innovation, most recently with its launch of Blood Orange Ginger Beer.

“The simplest ginger beer is brewed, but it’s brewed like tea,” says Charles Gibb, CEO North America Fever-Tree USA. “With our ginger beer, we use three types of ginger, from Nigeria, from Ivory Coast and from Cochin, India. One’s quite earthy, one’s chocolatey, and one’s spicy. We small-batch brew it, and then add our water and carbonate it, and it’s ready to go.”

With ginger ale, it’s a similar process, but it’s a clearer liquid. “As a result, it tends to be a little bit softer in terms of its flavor profile, and ginger ale mixes originally were crafted with whiskey in mind. It also does beautifully with cognac,” Gibb says.

For Fever-Tree’s latest ginger offering, it worked with Maker’s Mark to come up with an expression that works well with whiskey, and the Blood Orange Ginger Beer is the result. “You can’t have ginger beer that doesn’t have the taste of ginger, but we wanted the citrus notes from the orange coming through strongly,” he says.

The main quality of a good ginger beer, Gibb says, is that when it’s combined with a spirit or served straight, is that it arouses a thirst in the drinker. “If I finish drinking the cocktail, do I want another one?” Gibb says. “Far too many drinks don’t pass that test. Many mixers not only kill the spirit, but they dampen and dull your taste buds.”

One of Gibb’s favorite uses of ginger beer is to combine it with grapefruit mixer. “Add some tequila, and call it a spicy Paloma,” Gibb says. “The really great thing about ginger is that it stands up to the the flavor of just about anything.”

Q Mixers

Ginger Beer, Ginger Ale, Hibiscus Ginger Beer, Tropical Ginger Beer, and Light Ginger Beer

When Jordan Silbert, founder and CEO of Q Mixers, set out to make a better ginger beer, he took a look at some of the standard ginger mixers at bars. “Most ginger beers try to be both a spicy, ready to drink beverage and a mixer, and from my perspective, they do neither particularly well,” Silbert says. “A lot of them have much more sugar than Coke or Sprit so when I was making mine, I designed it to be extra spicy, extra carbonated and less sweet.”

While working on his ginger beer, one of his favorite bartenders gave him this advice: “‘Just don’t wimp out’ is what he told me,” Silbert says.

But the ginger beer actually came second in development to his ginger ale. “Our ginger ale is a little more gingery than most ginger ales, and it’s designed for cocktails as opposed to just drinking one in the afternoon for lunch,” he says. “It took me four years to do ginger ale. It needed some complexity, and I put a little bit of rose oil and coriander and cardamon in it,” he says.

Silbert says the idea for ginger ale came from his restaurant clients who were embarrassed by their ginger ale offerings on tap after they added his tonic water. “We use agave as as sweetener,” he says. “It’s just a rounder sweetness as opposed to a blast of sugar, and it lasts longer in your cocktail.”

The first flavored ginger beer he came out with was hibiscus. “That was more a matter of having fun,” he says. “The world is an exciting place, and you should have drinks to reflect this. We have this bright, hibiscus color, and this fun, floral tartness on top of the ginger.”

The hibiscus marries well with tequila, but it also makes for an interesting whiskey sour, too, he says.

Then the tropical ginger beer was designed “to take the mule on vacation.” “It’s got this spice and mango and passionfruit, but it’s a sophisticated vacation,” he says. “It’s not syrupy sweet and it won’t leave you hungover the next day with all of the sugar. A lot of those tropical drinks are too syrupy sweet with fake flavors. This isn’t one of them.”

The tropical and hibiscus flavors work well as a replacement for sparkling wine in punches and other drinks. “It has some sweetness that sparkling wine has, but it’s less sweet and more refreshing with a spicy kick,” he says.

Uncle Waithley’s Ginger Beer with a Scotch Bonnet Bite

Karl Franz Williams, owner of Harlem’s 67 Orange Street and New Haven’s Anchor Spa, grew up drinking his family’s homemade ginger beer on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. “It was this delicious ginger drink we always had,” he says.

As a mixologist and restaurateur, he didn’t like the ginger beers that were available. “I didn’t want this sugary thing that would give me diabetes,” he says.

Williams started really working on it in 2020, and he launched Uncle Waithley’s in 2022. The ginger beer is named after his grandfather, Uncle Waithley.

To find the right balance, he uses mineral water, cane sugar and lime juice, as well as fresh ginger, and with the real ginger, the beer has a slightly cloudy appearance in the bottle. But perhaps the most unusual aspect to his ginger beer is he uses Scotch bonnet peppers. “Scotch bonnet is prized throughout the Caribbean and Africa not only for its spiciness but also for the other flavors it has,” he says. “It adds this additional layer of flavor, and it feels and tastes like the Caribbean,. It gives it a nice, long, warming finish.”

Uncle Waithley’s launched at the Harlem branch of Whole Foods, and “we were just flying out the door,” Williams says. “We’re now doing a controlled expansion.”

Cutwater Mixers Ginger Beer

Cutwater Spirits came out with its ginger beer when it released its canned Vodka Mule, and then, shortly thereafter, it released a Whiskey Mule.

“We needed to have our own ginger beer, and we think it’s important that a good ginger beer actually has ginger root flavoring, with pure cane syrup,” says Laura Price, beverage ambassador at the Cutwater Spirits Tasting Room & Kitchen. “The vodka mule is one of our top four, most popular canned cocktails throughout the country. There’s a nice spice to it, it’s super refreshing and really effervescent, and people respond very well to it.”

The thing about ginger beer cocktails, she says, is that it’s quite easy to make them seasonal. “In the summer, out tasting room had a male made with blueberry and vanilla with lavender, and now we have an apple cider mule with horchata vodka and cinnamon and ginger beer,” she says. “It’s one of those things you can change with the seasons with a copupe of little tweaks here and there.”

Easy tweaks are to add some bitters to the cocktail or switch out the lime juice with grapefruit juice or lemon juice, she says. It’s also great to muddle some mint leaves with a little bit of lime and simple syrup, then top with gin and ginger beer. “That’s sort of like a gin mojito and mule mashup,” she says. “Cucumber also goes really well with ginger so you can throw that into a classic Tom Collins, but make it with ginger beer, and then you have your own, unique twist on a classic.”

“Ginger has that zing to it, but it’s so approachable,” Price says. “If you just add a different garnish - mi”

Top Note Ginger Beer

Though Top Note’s co-founder and president Mary Pellettieri likes a Mule like everyone else, she prefers rum to vodka when it comes to ginger.

“I prefer ginger beer with Jamaican rum,” she says. “The ginger is very cooling and soothing and with rum, it adds interesting warm and toasty notes.”

She designed her ginger beer to have some earthy, botanical notes in it, and she wanted to keep the sugar as low as possible without going sugar-free or unbalancing it. “We also use date sugar to give it color and flair and to mix better with rum, and that’s ginger beer to me in a nutshell.”

Pellettieri recommends mixing with fruits and herbs - blueberry and basil goes well with vodka, but she also loves using tequila and especially mezcal with it. “Cranberries and ginger are also delicious, and Great Lakes Distillery makes a cranberry liqueur that goes really well with it,” she says. “If you look at tasting wheels where different flavors mesh, ginger is often at the foundation, and it can go in so many different directions. That’s why it’s had such a long life in the cocktail world.”

And if you’re looking to add a ginger syrup to a cocktail, Pellettieri advises taking a good ginger beer and reducing it to a syrup. “That’s a lot easier than making a ginger syrup by hand,” she says.

AVEC Ginger

The lowest calorie and sugar content of most ginger mixers, AVEC Ginger mixer clocks in at 25 calories and 5 grams of sugar. Made with pineapple juice and lime juice, agave and molasses are added to the ginger and all spice extracts.

“We’re 80 percent or so less sugar than regular (ginger mixers), and we use pineapple juice as our sweetener instead of cane sugar so we have less and better sugar.,” says Alex Doman, co-founder. “We still use a ton of ginger to give it a similar kick to a ginger beer - it’s just more tropical in feel.”

Doman says he loves using AVEC Ginger in a Mexican mule made with 1.5 oz. Tequila, half a can of AVEC Ginger (a can is 8.45 oz.) and a squeeze of lime.

“Ginger is an unavoidable classic, loved for its fiery kick,” Doman says. “It’s a classic for mixers due to its strong flavor. Consumers and bar staff tend to like AVEC because it provides a powerful punch, with a slightly different flavor and much better for the waistline.”

Ginger Beer Cocktail Recipes

Glasgow Mule

While the Moscow Mule is famously made with vodka, this version substitutes whiskey

2 oz blended Scotch whisky

.5 oz Elderflower Liqueur

.75 oz lemon juice

3 dashes Angostura bitters

4 oz Top Note Ginger Beer

Garnish: fresh lemon wheel, crystallized ginger

Stir all ingredients together in a mule mug or tall glass. Top up with crushed ice and garnish.

Transfusion

Named for its blood red color, and perhaps its power to reinvigorate, this is a particularly refreshing cocktail

2 oz vodka

.5 oz Ginger Beer reduction

.5 oz lime juice

2 oz Top Note Club Soda No. 1

Concord grape juice ice cubes

Garnish: fresh Concord grapes and crystallized ginger

Ginger Beer Reduction: Pour an 8.5 oz bottle of Top Note Ginger Beer into a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes or until reduced by half. Remove from heat and let cool. Keep refrigerated.

Concord Grape Juice Ice Cubes: Pour Concord grape juice into an ice cube tray and freeze for at least 8 hours.

Combine all ingredients except the Club Soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a rocks glass over Concord grape juice ice cubes. Top with club soda, stir, and garnish.

The Best Ginger Beers for Using in Cocktails & 2 Recipes