16 Oct 2013 Lagerita: beer the hottest new cocktail ingredient
Gone are the days that beer was happy alone in saloon bars, and on football terraces, maybe in your living room, certainly in the fridge. But you wouldn’t find it in fancy restaurants, unless you were in Belgium. It just wasn’t its scene. And cocktail bars? You’re kidding, right?
In growing numbers, bars are adorning their menus with cocktails made with beer. They are, as The Good Food Guide points out, the drink of 2013. Today deft-handed mixologists are using beer to make cocktails of ballerina-like poise and grace.
Bartenders are throwing over the accepted wisdom on beer cocktails. The effervescent qualities of beer may well be at their most appealing in the summer, but is that reason enough to remove it from the list once the nights draw in and the coats go on? Are not long cocktails – and they do tend to be longer than their spirit-and-mixer counterparts – just as good in the autumn, and winter, even? And anyway isn’t beer more interesting a mixer than, say, soda?
The answer, if the range of bars that now serve them is anything to go by, is a big, fat empathetic yes.
Head to east London, and to that well-known place of beards and body art, the Hawksmoor bar. Here, so convinced are the mixologists of the wonder of well-made beer cocktails, they have made it the house’s signature. A British gin, London Pride, a tot of lemon juice and homemade ginger syrup go into Shaky Pete’s Ginger Brew, and out comes a drink that crackles and pops on the tongue..…