Piña Pica (this page)
Piña Pica (this page)
ALTHOUGH THE UNITED STATES IS IN THE MIDST OF A CRAFT COCKTAIL RENAISSANCE THAT REVELS IN UNIQUE INGREDIENTS AND UNUSUAL COMBINATIONS, BEER REMAINS AN UNDERUTILIZED INGREDIENT BEHIND THE BAR.
A skeptical attitude toward mixing other ingredients with beer goes back a long time. “There’s not much you can ‘do’ with beer, except indulge in the pleasant task of drinking it,” says Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts (1949). Until the last few years, that was the attitude in the craft cocktail world too.
Yet mixing with beer has a long and storied history, as even Esquire’s Handbook attests. Despite the dismissive statement above, a number of drinks combining beer and other ingredients appear in the book, including classics like Mulled Ale, the Flip, and Lamb’s Wool (this page, this page, and this page). Once staples of tavern life, by the mid-twentieth century these drinks had become relics of days gone by.
In the nineteenth century—and for hundreds of years before—using beer in drinks was absolutely normal. Adding sugar, spice, and spirits was common practice. So was heating beer over a fire or by plunging a red-hot poker into it, to serve it warm on a cold night.
Even the lines between food and drink were sometimes a bit blurry. Drinks like Aleberry, caudles, and possets were standard fare in homes and taverns. These combined beer or wine with grain, milk, cream, or eggs to thicken them, providing both nutrition and a warming drink.
Not all of these appeal to modern drinkers. “A terrible drink . . . with a terrible name,” writes Alice Morse Earle in Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1894), was “whistle-belly vengeance. It consisted of sour household beer simmered in a kettle, sweetened with molasses, filled with brown-bread crumbs and drunk piping hot.”
Historian Dorothy Hartley, in her 1954 book Food in England, explains that modern travelers, accustomed to comfortable transport and regular meals, no longer feel the need for such “soup wine” or “ale meal.” When travel was harder and meals were scarce, these struck a happy medium for the weary traveler.
After long hours of travel, hot wine, or spirits, on an empty stomach, were not too good, and yet often you were too tired to eat. Thus, the compromise of a caudle, which warmed you, fed you, and “kept you going till you could obtain a solid meal.”
Even in the 1950s, Hartley wrote that the custom of a “food drink” persisted among the working poor and rural folk. But by the latter half of the twentieth century, these drinks were well on their way out. What happened?
For one thing, the beer changed, and largely for the better. Owners of old-fashioned pubs and taverns didn’t get their beer in sterile metal kegs or clean glass bottles like they do today. It was often brewed on site, a living thing kept at cellar temperatures in wooden casks and tended by the owner.
This sounds romantic—and good cask-conditioned ale today is rightfully held in high regard—but quality wasn’t always assured. The ale could be too old, too yeasty, or spoiled by bacteria. It could be unpleasantly smoky with flavor carried over from barley malt roasted over flame. Or worse, it could have who-knows-what added to it to mask off flavors.
In his 1892 book The Flowing Bowl, William Schmidt cautioned drinkers about the adulterations common earlier in the century:
This healthy and agreeable beverage used to be prepared often enough from a mixture containing many violent poisons, as Indian hemp, opium, sulphuric acid, sulphate of iron, etc.—nay, the addition of strychnia, even was suspected.
The 1871 edition of Oxford Night Caps encourages readers to make drinks with home-brewed beer for the same reason, noting the various ways “common brewers and publicans” corrupted their beer with frightening additions. Presumably there was some exaggeration here, but if the beer was unreliable, one can imagine why drinkers liked to add sugar, spice, and everything nice to cover up its defects.
Technology changed all that. Railroads and mechanical refrigeration made it possible to transport beer over longer distances and keep it cold on the journey. Breweries grew larger, taking over the production of beer on regional and eventually national scales. Crisp, German-style lagers, served ice cold, replaced traditional English ales as the style of choice.
As the beer improved, the need to fix it up diminished. And even if patrons wanted the old-style beer drinks, the new lagers wouldn’t have worked very well in them. A pint of mulled ale with spice and brandy is enticing; giving the same treatment to a lager isn’t as appealing.
The bars changed too, with fancy cocktails individualized to suit the customer’s taste replacing the communal punch bowl. The gallons of ale punch, wassail bowls, or refreshing “cups” of ale mixed with fruit, spirits, and spices gradually fell out of style as the age of cocktails took hold.
And, finally, a series of disastrous events in the early twentieth century took their toll on the alcohol business: two world wars, the Great Depression, and Prohibition. Breweries and distilleries shut down, and bartenders retired from the trade or moved to Europe. By the time things settled down, many of the old practices and ingredients had been forgotten. Cold beer and simple cocktails ruled the day.
Until recently, that is. The revival of American craft beer dates to the 1970s, with a community of homebrewers coming into its own, and Anchor Brewing and New Albion reviving the tradition of making quality ales. They set off a revolution in craft beer. Today, there are more than 2,500 breweries in the United States. Coupled with a strong import market, the quality and diversity of beers available here are without precedent.
The rebirth of cocktail and spirit culture took longer, in part because of stricter regulations on distillation; many brewers got their start making beer at home, but doing the same with spirits risks hefty fines and a prison sentence. Nonetheless, cocktail culture began reviving in earnest in the late 1990s, bringing back classic pre-Prohibition cocktails and driving interest in creative mixology using fresh fruits and herbs, obscure spirits, and inventive culinary techniques.
The market for spirits has expanded too, with imports like genever, Old Tom–style gin, mezcal, rhum agricole, cachaça, and Italian amaro enjoying renewed popularity. Smaller distilleries are following in the footsteps of beer brewers, rapidly expanding in number and creating new products with unusual ingredients.
Given the recent revivals of craft beer, quality spirits, and creative cocktails, it’s no surprise that they are beginning to meet in the same glass. That this book took form in Portland, Oregon—one of the best cities in the world for brewing, distilling, and making cocktails—is not entirely surprising either.
Credit for spotting this trend before it developed goes to my friend Ezra Johnson-Greenough, a Portland-based beer blogger, event organizer, and label artist for several local breweries. Seeing the potential for mixing spirits and beer, he came up with the idea for Brewing Up Cocktails, an event featuring an entire menu of cocktails using beer as an ingredient. He recruited me and Yetta Vorobik, owner of the Hop and Vine bar in Portland, to help make it happen.
The event successfully bridged the gap between Portland’s beer and cocktail communities and became the first of many of our collaborations. Over the next four years, we held Brewing Up Cocktails events in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, and New Orleans. These were often built around themes, such as tropical cocktails or drinks made with eggs, or around the portfolio of beers from an individual brewery.
As our experience grew, so did our sense of how to use beer as an ingredient. It can be tricky, and in our early days we tried some experiments that are better left forgotten. But through trial and error, research, and the eager consumption of beer cocktails invented by our colleagues in the bar industry, we came to develop an understanding of the great variety of ways beer can be used in mixed drinks.
As the pages that follow will demonstrate, beer can be used as a wonderfully versatile ingredient in cocktails. Various styles of beer can stimulate all of our basic senses of taste. Dark roasted malts and aggressive hops can add bitterness to a drink. Sour ales like Berliner weisse and lambic can provide acidity. Fruity beer or rich, malty ale can sweeten a cocktail. Even salt and umami can sometimes be found in beer, with the former an ingredient in German gose and adventurous brewers trying out such ingredients as seaweed and bacon. The carbonation in beer can also serve to lighten and lengthen a drink, providing an interesting alternative to sodas and sparkling wine. With beer offering so many different possibilities for cocktails, able to suit all palates and occasions, I felt compelled to spread the word.
This book is a distillation of six years of experience drinking beer cocktails and creating them for bar menus and special events. Chapter 1 digs into old books for the beer cocktails of the past, whether they be straightforward punches or easy ways of spicing up a basic lager. Chapter 2 looks at the lost art of serving beer hot, from simple mulled ales to strange yet tasty concoctions unlike anything found in (most) bars today. Finally, Chapter 3 takes up contemporary mixology in all its glorious creativity, working modern beer styles, varied spirits, and house-made ingredients into deliciously unique cocktails.
When I first got into beer cocktails, they were few and far between on most cocktail menus. Writing this book, I encountered so many that I couldn’t possibly include them all. I’ve done my best to narrow them down so as to showcase as wide a variety of ingredients and techniques as possible. I hope that it will continue to inspire the mingling of beers and spirits, bringing beer back to a deservedly prominent place in the bartender’s arsenal.
