The social drinker

Icame of age in Dublin in the 1980s, when shandy (beer mixed with a soft drink) was usually regarded as a somewhat effeminate drink. There were probably plenty of unabashed shandy drinkers happily knocking back pints and half pints, but I never met them in the Buttery of Trinity College, or in pubs like Toner’s and Grogan’s, where we drank Guinness and Bass.

I had to work as a barman in a hard-as-nails pub in London’s East End one summer before I realised that there was nothing effete about shandy. That sunny summer, I mixed port and whisky shorts or poured pints of shandy for small-time gangsters with the improbable muscles that come from years of working out in prison gyms.

It was then that I understood that shandy was simply a drink which, like any other drink, had its pluses and minuses. A good drink on a hot summer’s afternoon, or when you had already had too much to drink. A bad drink if you are prone to burping.

The hard men in that pub, who did not mind burping, drank shandy when they felt like it, or a previously unheard of concoction called a ‘lager top’, which is made by pouring an inch of lemonade into a pint glass and topping it up with lager.

Years later, when I was living in Bavaria, and then Hamburg, where they take their beer seriously but also enjoy lovely hot summers, I was reminded that East Enders do not have a monopoly when it comes to shandy appreciation. There it is called Radler or Alsterwasser, depending on where you live, but the drink is just the same: a refreshing and delicious 50-50 mix of beer and lemonade. The Germans take things further than the Brits, sometimes mixing their lovely dark beers with CocaCola to create a concoction that is usually called Diesel. This summer, if we get some decent weather, don’t forget that shandy is a simple, enjoyable solution to remaining hydrated in the sun.