It can be tough to please everyone when it comes to selecting drinks, but beer cocktails can offer a best-of-both-worlds scenario. Whether you level up your Miller High Life and make a Spaghett cocktail, or opt for a savory-spicy michelada , these creative spins on a bottle of suds can unify a party, and one undeniable classic in this category is the citrusy shandy. Today, most recipes call for a lager and a lemon element (often lemonade, or lemon-lime soda), but there is one ingredient that can really punch up your shandy's profile — and that's ginger.
There's actually even historic precedent for this flavor profile. I f you've ever wondered, what a shandy is and why it's called that , the story takes you back about a century and a half to England, at which one point shandy ingredients included ginger beer. That means that this zingy modern spin on a shandy has a built-in nod to the drink's origins, too.
Today, a ginger shandy recipe adds in a tasty ginger liqueur to the standard recipe. But you can work with even fewer ingredients if you combine equal parts lager and ginger ale or beer. You can also opt to include fresh ginger simple syrup for a potent sweet-spicy kick.
This simple twist is delicious on its own, but can open up your drink to even more flavor combinations. Personalizing a signature spicy shandy You can embellish your ginger shandy in a variety of ways. The flavors of lemon and ginger together in this shandy riff work well with herbs like rosemary, thyme, a.