The shandy is a refreshing beer cocktail that's easy to make at home! Pour up this low alcohol drink in warm weather or anytime.

Classic Shandy

pale ale or lager beer

ginger ale, ginger beer, lemon lime soda (Sprite), or sparkling lemonade

For the garnish: lemon wedge (optional)

dash bitters adds a complex flavor

Add the beer and mixer to a glass and stir gently to combine. Garnish with a lemon wedge.

There's another common British shandy drink that you see people drinking a lot. You could do another recipe for that one. It's Guinness (or any stout) mixed with blackcurrant cordial. To be honest it sounds absolutely ghastly to me. I can't imagine those two flavours going well together. But it seems to be pretty popular, and I don't really like regular shandy either, so it's probably just me lol. You can tell when people are drinking it even from across the room, because the head/foam on it is bright purple instead of the cream colour it normally is. I've heard that blackcurrant basically doesn't exist in the US, because centuries ago it carried a disease which wiped out pine trees, and pine trees were a lot more valuable to Americans than blackcurrants were, so they opted to just completely get rid of all blackcurrants. But these days you can simply go on one of those sites that import British food and buy blackcurrant cordial there (or even amazon sell it, I import American foods to here on UK amazon myself, stuff that isn't sold here that I've always wanted to try). Look for something called Ribena. That's the big brand that everyone drinks, there's not many things more British than Ribena. They use something crazy like 90% of all blackcurrants grown in the UK just to make their cordial. You can get fizzy/sparkling Ribena too (pre-made, so it's not a cordial that you have to dilute), if you wanted to add even more bubbles to the Guinness. 
    
But yeah, personally if I want a sweeter stout, I get a pint of Mild. Mild is a type of beer that's dying out, sadly, even though it's absolutely gorgeous. It's seen as an old man's drink. It's still very similar to a stout, and to be honest many of the real ale/microbrewery/craft beer "stouts" like the common chocolate stouts or vanilla stouts or oatmealare actually just Mild, but they call them stout because younger people don't know what Mild even is. It's a bad name, marketing wise, for the target audience of university students who want to party. Even though it'll still get you drunk. But it you ever visit the UK and you see a pub that sells Mild, you've got to try it. 
     
But "Guinness and black", which is the name people use when they order it, is decently popular. I see it more than I do people drinking regular shandy. That could just be the type of pubs I go into though. It's more alcoholic than a regular shandy too because you only need a small amount of the blackcurrant cordial seeing as how it's a concentrated flavour.
    
You might be able to get away with using grape cordial instead, if you don't wanna import Ribena. I don't know though. I've just heard that whenever something is purple in the US, it means grape flavour, whereas over here it's always blackcurrant. Like our skittles have a blackcurrant flavour.

classic shandy

Prep Time: 2 minutes

Total: 2 minutes

Servings: 1

Author : Sonja Overhiser

Ingredients

Instructions

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