The Spirit World

Last weekend Long Island had a serious ice storm. I didn’t know it was serious until Saturday morning when I went to step out into what I thought was about four inches of snow only to find myself slipping and skating around on top of a four inch thick layer of ice!

We live on top of a hill. It’s twenty-seven steps down to the street. The only thing I could do was start chipping through the ice. I’m not a physical labor sort of guy. I make my living with my brain, so physical activity, especially activity involving tools like shovels and picks and axes is a real challenge for me. In a masochistic sort of way, I like the pain of physical labor, partly because I usually reward my hard work with a beer or two at the end of it when I rest my aching bones and muscles.

Physical labor produces a powerful thirst. The last thing you want to do is try to quench that thirst with a few 5+% ABV craft brews. You’ll just end up falling asleep. It’s at these moments when you might want to think about mixing the beer with a soft drink.

The most well know beer/soft drink combination is Shandy, a mix of beer and lemonade (or something along those lines). I want to save writing about the Shandy (canonical beer and lemonade shandies) until the summer when it is good and hot and there is some actual lawn mowing to be done. I had plenty of time while I was out cutting four inch thick slabs of ice off my steps to think about what I wanted to drink. I decided that it would be fun to have a Black Bart, a Diesel, a Broadway.

You might think that Black Bart (aka John Roberts aka Bart Roberts, any relation to the Dread Pirate Roberts?) is the most successful of the golden age pirates, but for those of us into beer cocktails, a Black Bart refers to a mixture of stout and cola. Typically, these kind of beer and cola mixes can be adjusted for your taste. A half and half mix is probably the default, but you can cut back on the cola if it’s too sweet for you.

Actually, that’s one of the things I like about the beer/cola mixes is that as I’ve grown older, the syrupy sweetness of colas just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Mixing a cola with a beer can bring down the sweetness level of the cola to a more enjoyable and thirst quenching level.

If you don’t have any stout around the house, you can combine the cola with any other beer you might have. The combination of cola with lager has a couple of different names. In Japan mixing cola and lager is evidently quite popular and the resulting low-alcohol blend is called a Broadway. According to several unidentified sources on the web in Germany a mix of beer and cola is called a Diesel (a name shared with at least one other beer cocktail).

In February I mixed up something called a Liverpool Kiss, a mix of stout and cassis. Well, that is relative of another kind of Diesel, a member of the Snakebite family of beer cocktails. The Snakebite version of a Diesel consists of equal parts lager and cider with a dash of cassis (blackcurrant liqueur). If you order a Diesel at a bar in Germany, you might not get what you anticipate.

I’ll have to do some additional research to find out what we call beer/cola mixes in the US. If you know, please leave a comment and give me a source if you have one. My guess is that in the US we would probably just lump them into the Shandy family.

Check back later in the week. I’ll post some tasting notes for a few different combinations of beer and cola.