I believe that we need more salt-rimmed beverages in our lives.  Or, at least, in my life.  As the salt cures me, it will preserve my liver as well.  This is all about science.

We all know about salt-rimmed margaritas and licking the salt before taking a shot of tequila.  A few years ago, however, I was turned on to micheladas, Mexican beers mixed with various lime-tomato-chili combinations and served on ice in a salt-rimmed glass. My favorite has long been the one served at the incomparable Chevela’s in Prospect Heights.  Their tomato mixture is some kind of spicy bloody mary mix and the salt on the rim is mixed with something tangy.  Shannon speculates dried tamarind.  (Shannon, who loathes tomato juice, loves micheladas; so what does that tell you?) Last night, though, we ate at El Centro in Hell’s Kitchen after watching Alvin Ailey’s dancers kill it, and the micheladas there are simply Modelo Especial mixed with fresh lime and mottled costeño chile, a moderately hot chili used in sauces.  They were fresh and refreshing.  Presented with straws, we sucked them down in minutes.

They got me wondering, though, about the origins of the michelada.  And the wondrous internet provides a handful of different possibilities.

The L.A. Times reports that in the ‘40s some mystery man named Michel Ésper in San Luis Potosi routinely ordered his beers be served on ice in a lemonade glass called a chabela (apparently such a glass exists) with lime, salt, and a straw.  Other folks in his sports club soon started ordering “Michel’s lemonade,” and eventually the name was collapsed into “michelada.”

The Times also reports, rather uninspiringly, that since “chela” is a typical synonym for “beer” in Mexico, asking for “my cold beer” is tantamount to asking for “mi chela helada.”

An online company specializing in the rainbow of variations on the basic michelada template claims that a general of the Mexican Revolution named Augusto Michel ordered a beer in San Luis Potosi and mixed it with lemon juice and hot sauce, giving birth to the drink before going off to kick autocratic ass.  This origin story puts the drink’s birth around 1910.  A different Mexican food company declares that the general spiked his beer with soy sauce, lime, picante sauce, and, yes, salt.

Today, sprinting into a diversity required of late stage Capitalism and a country that deems it necessary to have four flavors of Mountain Dew, major beer distributors like Budweiser have started to market micheladas in a can.  You can now buy a tall boy of Bud Lite premixed with Clamato.  Yuh-mee!  Or you can make a bloody mary with palatable beer instead of vodka and get your daily Vitamin C with your salt and fermentation.