Since summer has finally decided to show up in time for the Olympic games, we are celebrating in our household by putting the hot chocolate away and have reached into the back of the drinks cupboard for something a bit more fitting to the season. My partner loves Crabbies' ginger beer, and she introduced me to it a couple of summers ago. While I love the taste of ginger, Inever quite warmed to it the way some others have. I'm going to have one now, because I haven't tried it for a few years, and also because it's lunchtime on Friday and although I do have more constructive things to do, writing about daytime drinking is much more fun than spending half an hour on hold to the EON energy people.

Although Crabbies soared from relative obscurity to pub ubiquity a couple of years ago, it's been around for centuries in one guise or another since 1801. Coming from the Scottish port of Leith, where the imported ginger was processed into tonics to cure sea-sickness and, purportedly, loss of libido, it's a slightly different type of ginger beer from the fiery stuff that comes from the Caribbean. Perhaps the gloomy Scottish climate takes a bit more of a toll on the drive for nocturnal activities than the balmy West Indian sunshine.

Anyway, there's only so much pseudo-science that one can cram into a 500ml bottle of fizz, so what does it actually taste like? Before we try some, best prepare it the way the manufacturers reckon. Lots of ice... check... big chunk of lime... and since it's marketed as pop for grown ups, I'm going to put a curly, dayglo orange straw in it too. Huzzah! Summer is here.

The first thing that hits me is the sugar. Crabbies' ginger beer is sweet. Molasses sweet. Its sugar content is ridiculously high, and since I don't have much of a sweet tooth this is really too much for me. Past the sweetness is a lot of ginger, which I really like. According to the website, the ginger is steeped for 8 weeks in the brew, which is no doubt a good idea to give it a deep natural gingery flavour. Flipping the bottle round, the nutritional gubbins on the back tells me that per 100ml serving, it has 7g of sugar. Ouch. I can almost feel the enamel sliding off my teeth here. It also coats the mouth with sticky goo, much in the same way that Coca-Cola does. The ABV is a respectable 4%, which isn't going to give you the KO straight away but given that a) this doesn't taste remotely alcoholic and b) it usually comes in bottles that are either 500 or 700ml, it could be quite easy to get wrecked off this stuff without realising it.

Although it is far too sweet for me to drink half a litre of this in one go, it is really quite cool to cook with. Adding a generous glug to some spices and tomato puree, this makes a fairly decent sweet barbecue sauce. Credit where it's due, I took this idea from fellow dooyoer Lady Bracknell's suggestion to reduce Coca Cola down to a sticky BBQ sauce, which worked really well. This is pretty much the same, only with a Caribbean ginger twist to it.

You can buy this stuff readily now, with most pubs serving it and it turns up at very low prices in Home Bargains and B&M, usually around the £1.29 mark for a 500ml bottle. Personally, I think I'll stick with hoppy ales or G&T for alcoholic summer drinks, as Crabbies is just a bit too sickly, though on occasion the little 330ml bottles are quite nice, when I feel the need for some ginger beer that's 'only for grown ups'.