A Confession and a Drink Made For Tweens

alright, here's my confession. I made a Shandy yesterday. and I liked it. a lot. I know Big Love will be very disappointing to hear of this development, but it's been Do the Right Thing hot out this week and I was in need of a cooling bevvie to deal with it. the Shandy has been on my mind ever since it was suggested to a JT reader as an alternative to the high octane brews that her boyfriend prefers. my experience with Shandy's has been hit, miss & now hit again. the first one that I had was in a Pub in Wales or West England with my Grandpa when I was 14. I can't remember whether I actually enjoyed it, because I was just so excited that I was allowed to drink in a pub. Shandys served in the UK are almost always made from lager and lemonade. UK pub lemonade is lemon pop - Sprite and 7-Up are even considered lemonades. so, when I tried a Shandy years later, I turned up my nose and ordered an ale. I had had a Shandy made with lager and Jamaican ginger beer a few years back and have always remembered how good it was. so, when the thermostat hit it's peak and I was well into my second shirt, I knew it was time to forget about those English pub Shandys and make a stellar one.

the key to the Jamaican Shandy is the ginger beer rather than the lager, so I went with a decent quality one called Old Tyme. with the lager, you can go pretty cheap. I went with a Stiegl from Austria, as the tall boys were on sale. I tried a a couple of different ratios of beer to ginger beer. first, I went with the classic 50/50 ratio which was far too spicy for me- the punch from the ginger in Old Tyme is more of a haymaker than a jab. so, I added some more lager and got to a much more tolerable 75/25 ratio. the spiciness of the ginger played well off the sweetness of the lager. the two individual tastes never really meld into one, like a fruit beer might, but the result was nonetheless satisfying. after mixing in a nearby park and some shade under a tree, I was one rack of BBQ ribs away from a perfect summer day.