{From left, the Dirty Heifer and the Chocolate-Covered Raspberry at The Crafty Chameleon}
This summer, my friends and I had a throwback afternoon by stirring up some Summer Beer. If you’re a beer snob, as many of us are in this fine suds city, I entirely understand your compulsion to scoff at this deceptively light tasting, college-ish concoction of wheat beer, lemonade and vodka. However, if you think of it more like sangria’s super-fun, trashy sister rather than a perversion of beer, then this drink will make you a beer cocktail convert.
Besides the rare, schedule-less summer day, though, most of us don’t have the luxury of sipping extremely strong beer cocktails (and thus rendered incapable of doing anything beside float in a pool all day). Enter the shandygaff.
Historically, the shandygaff, or shandy, is simply a beer diluted with lemonade, ginger beer or ginger ale that you can drink a bunch of without becoming a nuisance (i.e., Summer Beer minus the vodka). According to NPR’s Amy Guttman , the shandygaff has been guzzled around the world for centuries. In 19th-century England, the drink, originally called “Rich Man’s Shandy Gaff,” featured ale mixed with Champagne. But poorer Brits who couldn’t afford the bubbly started using ginger beer in its place. They, including much of the British military, found they could drink this thinned beer all day and still function (and we wonder why the British Empire fell … ).
Plebes and proletarians, as the temperature rises this weekend, try mixing your own shandy, or better yet, head to The Crafty Chameleon Bar, Ellisville’s new beer bar. Along with 40 beers on draft and more than 300 cans and bottles, The Crafty Chameleon has a “Crafty Concoction” menu featuring shandy variants and beer cocktails, which range from cider plus Guinness (Snakebite) to wheat beer with a splash of Framboise (Dirty Heifer) to chocolate stout topped with Framboise (Chocolate-Covered Raspberry), among a handful of others. For people who don’t like beer, these drinks serve as a great entry-point; for the beer lover who needs to take it easy, they offer an interesting alternative to tired light beers.
And for teachers returning to school Monday? Go big. Seclude yourself with a vat of Summer Beer and find a pool in which to laze.
-Photo by Michelle Volansky
This article appears in August 2013.