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Comment by pzone | Hacker News Reader

There's no alcohol in eg Canada Dry. It's ginger sugar syrup mixed with soda water, like any other soda.

True Ginger Beer, which is fermented using a SCOBY (similar to kombucha), contains a little bit of alcohol. But mass produced things like Ginger Ale don't...

Yup, true ginger beer can only be made with a symbiotic yeast/bacteria combo. Apperently needs to be harvested from the roots of certain trees. Quite interesting stuff

If it tastes like kombucha too you can miss me with that nasty stuff. I'll stick with the liquid candy!

I think there are alternative versions where you add champaign yeast to get a higher alcohol content.

The syrup may have trace amounts of alcohol in it due to the manufacturing process. I'm not sure about Canada Dry specifically, but Coke and Pepsi syrup do:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/hottopics/2012/06/28/coke-pepsi-co... or original article (French) here: http://www.60millions-mag.com/2012/06/27/coca-pepsi-et-autre...

true, but there's definitely a resurgence of local ginger ale/beer that contains alcohol: http://smalltownbrewery.com/our-beers/ginger-ale/ for example

Though these are at beer level.

Kombucha often contains a low (< 1%) amount of alcohol.

> Kombucha often contains a low (< 1%) amount of alcohol.

A coworker of mine was recently carded when purchasing kombucha :P

Just imagine how much some poor highschooler would have to chug. Yuk.

My thoughts exactly - in this case given the location I'd imagine they were being defensive about NYU students' underage "drinking", but good lord the quantities required to get drunk (or hell, even a tiny bit buzzed) on kombucha boggle the mind.

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