Give Your Shandy An Upgrade With One Zingy Ingredient

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. If 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.

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, and basil, which can be added with an infused simple syrup, or used as garnish. If you're a craft beer lover, you might want to swap out the standard lager and pull in some of your favorite styles that have complementary flavors. A Belgian tripel, for example, has notes of citrus, honey, and black pepper that would play well with ginger and lemon. While shandies are well-known as summer refreshments, if you've had a chance to try a pumpkin spice margarita, you can see how this cocktail can be converted into a fall favorite by adding a pumpkin ale into the mix (don't forget to rim the glass with cinnamon sugar). 

You can easily convert this drink into a mocktail, too. Just swap out your suds for a non-alcoholic beer and combine with ginger beer, lemon juice, and a little bit of sugar. You can even source and add some non-alcoholic bitters for balance. No matter how you spin your shandy, this spicy, ginger-spiked twist will be a citrusy, refreshing favorite no matter the season.