Tom Gabb: Beer in cocktails
I was sat in a bar the other day sipping on a refreshing watermelon wheat beer when I realised that attitudes towards my malty fermented friend have changed in recent years. My epiphany was simple, for better or worse the conceptual space between beer, spirits and cocktails seems to be closing. If you walked into an establishment ten years ago and ordered a tequila beer, a peanut butter ale or an IPA Pina colada you would probably be met with some trepidation, and that’s putting it politely.
While adventurous craft beers with names such as ‘Death by Coconut’ are extremely popular, they’re a topic for a different time. I think the more interesting concept is beer as an actual cocktail ingredient, where that idea came from and the rich history behind it.
In a sense beer cocktails rose to popularity in the same way that a lot of other cocktails have. Some incredibly expensive bar somewhere came up with a high concept cocktail that involved beer, this drink garnered a lot of attention and soon after everyone including your local Lola Lo’s has replicated it (and they have). In a lot of ways this kind of life cycle of trends is not dissimilar to the way high fashion trickles down from the catwalk to Primark.
Interestingly though, the first recorded example of beer actually being used in a cocktail was from 1695, before the term ‘cocktail’ was even coined. It was mentioned by playwright William Congreve in his restoration comedy Love For Love: “Thus we live at sea; eat biscuit, and drink flip”, a “flip” being a mixed drink comprised of beer, rum, and sugar, heated with a red-hot iron. The iron caused the drink to froth, and this frothing (or “flipping”) engendered the name.
Fast forward to the writing of the first influential bar guide (Jerry Thomas’s 1862 How to Mix Drinks) and the recipe is there, but with no beer. This says to me that had Mr Thomas been more of a traditionalist, beer would have never been robbed of its rightful and early status as a cocktail ingredient and we could have enjoyed 100 years of beery boozy beverages.
