Beer Cocktails! (Sorry…)
As many of you already know, cooking is not my “thing.” That’s why I write about beer and not the epicurial challenges of the kohlrabi, whatever that is. Left to my own devices, I’d be eating salads or sandwiches for every meal — the sandwich being basically the salad between slices of bread. I am really quite righteously impatient, though, so sometimes I just get a fistful of raisins and a fistful of peanuts and take bites from alternating hands.
Beer appeals to me for a number of reasons: it’s cold, it’s tasty, it can get you a little fucked up. We mustn’t forget, though, that it is also extremely easy to prepare.
- Open fridge.
- Pull out beer.
- Open beer.
- Drink beer.
My sense of economy is therefore threatened when approached by the idea of beer cocktails. I realize this has been a thing for a while now (as has calling something “a thing”), but I’ve never explored beer cocktails due to the above elegance of simplicity. I am understandably wary about a beer drink that involves more than these four steps. But then I had a Joan Harris at the Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland, OH.
No, it was not served in an hourglass.
Joan is the enviably curvy redhead in Mad Men. I am still unclear as to why this drink is called the Joan Harris, but do know that it mixes Market Garden’s Progress Pilsner with Drambuie, Cherry Heering, lemon juice, and rhubarb bitters. It was delicious and refreshing. I will never make it at home.
Why pay out for a drink at a bar when you could just do it yourself? I’ll tell you! There’s more than four ingredients, four being my limit in preparing anything. And two, I had to look up Cherry Heering as I’d never heard of it before and knew it wasn’t in my pantry. (Also it was spelled “herring” on this particular site, turning the ingredient into a red herring, itself.)
I want something with few ingredients, preferably ones I might already have. Cosmo had an article that claimed I would “freaking love” these 15 beer cocktails. “Sipping beer straight can be so…blah” it says, twirling its hair and snapping its gum. Most of their suggestions I “fucking hated,” and many were immediately disqualified for the above stipulations. Of the two remaining, Mike’s Full Moon (Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Blue Moon beer) caused me to recall, in unpleasant detail, the night in college when I gave myself a stomach ache drinking too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades before realizing how gross it truly is.
The Black Velvet: two ingredients, two steps. I GOT this.
The remaining cocktail is one that popped up in many a slideshow for the attention-challenged: the Black Velvet. Two ingredients: stout and champagne. I have both of these in my fridge right now…nevermind that the champagne was opened on New Year’s. The recipe also gets points for having a cool backstory. According to Paste Magazine, the drink originated in London in 1861, not long after Prince Albert died. Supposedly, “the club’s steward, in his grief over the the prince’s death, declared that ‘even the champagne should be put into mourning’ and mixed it with the inky dark Guinness.”
The drinks that didn’t pop up on the sexy slideshows of sweaty-glassed, wittily-named cocktails in proper stemware were the ones I was really looking for — those also being the ones that didn’t involve artisan bitters and sprigs of mint. The Shandy, for example, wasn’t always a meh drink bottled by Anheuser-Busch to look like a spunky little microbrew. It is beer and lemonade. Go pro and mix an ale with ginger beer for a Shandygaff.
And I could probably handle making a Cincinnati Cocktail: one part beer, one part soda water. It’s like making a light beer out of your favorite craft ale. Then again, the beer cocktail that most fits my personality is the Boilermaker: a shot of whisky and a pint of beer — you don’t even have to mix them first. One in one hand, one in the other. You know what to do.