Beer Cocktails Are Fun. Don’t Overthink Them

OPINION

For my sister and me, running across childhood objects stockpiled in boxes or stuck into books around our parents’ home is a source of sweetness, a reminder of their affection: shabby stuffed animals, globby daubs of poster paint with blobby creatures of indiscernible species frolicking over flat green fields, certificates of academic or athletic achievement (“Most Improved in the Far, Far Outfield Where We Put Her So She Couldn’t Screw Up Too Much” is a softball trophy I could have won multiple times). My sister and I count our folks’ loving support of our most trivial accomplishments as one of our lives’ great fortunes.

Now and then, though, they could probably be more aggressive about throwing stuff away. Like a few years ago when Dad mentioned that I’d left some beer in the basement fridge that I might want to take home to drink. Investigation revealed that the bottles in question were the remainders of a six-pack of Tequiza.

Some of you may recall this late-90s-era beer brand, juiced with “the natural flavour of lime” and sweetened with agave nectar, a brand that lots of people in flannel shirts and Doc Martens used to consume while listening to Pearl Jam and waiting for our dial-up modems to connect to the internet. The portmanteau name was supposed to suggest a marriage of tequila and cerveza, but for me also called to mind Ibiza, the famously party-oriented island in the Mediterranean.

I won’t be so gender-normative as to call it a girly beer, but it was certainly a gateway beer for this particular college girl, who then regarded the Fuzzy Navel (a cloying mixture of peach schnapps and orange juice) as peak-cocktail. My palate hadn’t evolved to appreciate the hoppy IPAs that I eventually gravitated to, and Tequiza helped me survive many a college party where the options were to BYOB or risk the “punch” that some guy had mixed in a Hefty bag and was serving out of a trash can, over near the chair you were invited to stand on to converse with the six-foot bong.

To be clear — when I say “a lot of people” were drinking Tequiza, it apparently wasn’t enough of them: Tequiza was discontinued by the late 2000s, and I’d stopped drinking it well before then. So while these bottles in my folks’ basement may not have been old enough to serve as the archaeological MacGuffin in “Indiana Jones and the Anheuser-Busch Marketing Ploy”, they were a good 15 years past their prime. Beer, especially that of the crisp lager and pilsner variety, has a short shelf life, and the one bottle I cracked open smelled like a skunk family had romped through a grove of rotting limes.

Still, I thought about Tequiza recently when I was contemplating the overall poor reputation of beer cocktails, a category I generally avoid the way I avoid religious pamphleteers. I’ve had far more bad “beertails” than good, and find most to be more a pairing of fish and bicycle than chocolate and peanut butter. The beers I drink are brews like Bell’s Two Hearted or Dogfish 75. They’re not beers that I want to add to — they’re big in flavour, complete on their own.

But some whiskey geeks would doubtless argue the same about mixing with their preferred spirit, and plenty of complex Italian amari are delicious solo but have become core ingredients in the cocktail compendium. And while roasting on an Alabama beach recently, I thought of those dumped bottles from my folks’ basement fridge with yearning. My recollection is that cold, unskunked Tequiza was pretty darn drinkable.

Basically, I reason, Tequiza was a beer cocktail of sorts. And it had common ground with the few other beer mixology examples I’ve liked. Most have been lager- or pilsner-based. These beers are not a blank slate, exactly. They don’t have the neutrality of vodka, but their soft, malty foundation doesn’t come in swinging, and can provide a base for a refreshing summer sip that can go in several directions, depending what other flavours — bitters, umami, citrus or some combination — you decide to add.

For example, one of my favourite beertails is a cheeky little number called the Spaghett, in which Baltimore bartender Reed Cahill, working at Wet City Brewing back in 2016, riffed on the growing popularity of drinks like the Aperol Spritz, pairing the bittersweet orange Italian liqueur with beer. Not only do I love red Italian bitters, I love it when “fancy” things put on cozy clothes, so a drink that you make by chugging a slug of Miller High Life — itself a longtime embracer of fancy European beverages, via its famous “Champagne of Beers” tagline — and build in the bottle pretty much had me at “Yo”. It’s exactly what you want from a drink you’ll throw together to sip on a weathered sun-warmed deck — low fuss and high reward, the colour of sunsets.

Then you’ve got Mexico’s Michelada, and if your tastes run to the savoury (Bloody Mary and dirty martini fans, this may be your beer-tail) it’s a concoction you should be exploring. At its most basic, the Michelada is beer, lime and hot sauce, but there are all sorts of regional variations around Mexico, many of which include tomato juice and a highly savoury element such as Maggi seasoning — if you haven’t tasted it, think of it along the lines of soy or Worcestershire sauce — or Clamato juice, speaking of portmanteaus. I ended up playing around with a more Asian-flavour-inflected version here, one with both umami savouriness from sriracha and soy sauce and sweetness from pineapple-ginger juice. You can adjust both the spice level and the savoury factor by playing with the amounts of sriracha and soy. (I promise I didn’t just concoct this because I wanted to call it a Piña-chelada, but I may have my fingers crossed behind my back.)

And then there’s one of the longest-standing beer cocktails around: it’s a shandy in England and a radler in Germany, but when you order it at a pub, you’re getting a mix of beer and lemon soda (though the Austrian brand Steigl makes a canned grapefruit radler that’s eminently drinkable). I’ve had the drink in both England and Germany, but what I was craving was a shandified version of what people do with Corona and other Mexican lagers already, dropping a squeezed lime wedge into the neck of the bottle. A little agave syrup added appeal for those with a sweet tooth (and throwing in a smidgen of blanco tequila is not a bad option either).

In the cocktail world, there’s a well-known anecdote about the invention of the Jasmine (a mix of gin, lemon, Campari and Cointreau) back in the 1990s. Per Robert Simonson’s book A Proper Drink, when bartender Paul Harrington first mixed one up and presented it to a friend, the friend congratulated him for having invented grapefruit juice. I thought of that story when I took a sip of my Lime Shandy, pleased to have reinvented Tequiza.

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