Last summer my grandmother told he that when she was a kid her father used to drink Shantys when she was a kid. Beer and lemonade. My first thought was why would anyone want to ruin a beer by dumping lemonade in it?
But curiousity finally got the better of me, and you know what? This is pretty fuckin’ good stuff! Not for every beer drinking occasion, mind you, but very nice on a hot summer night.
Anyone else ever drink a Shanty? I’m using about 3/4 Labatt Blue, 1/4 Paul Newmans lemonade. Is there a “proper” mix proportion for a Shanty? I seem to have misplaced my bartender’s guide…
When I was a kid in Australia, shandy was a 1/2 and 1/2 mixture of beer and lemonade (equivalent to sprite or 7-up). This was generallly one’s first intro to alcohol, which means in Australia around 10 or 11 years old. You graduated to the harder stuff around 13.
The word is shandygaff. Don’t you own a dictionary?
Look it up. And yes, they are good in summer when you want a little something, but will be drinking long enough into the evening that you don’t want that much beer.
Shandys are nice and refreshing and just the thing if you intend to party all night without making a fool of yourself or suffering the following day.
I enjoy the occasional shandy, but I try not to let my blood alcohol level fall too low.
Well. See how much you can learn here? Pardon my ignorance. I guess I just haven’t seen enough print ads to know the spelling of Shandy. Jeez, I said I couldn’t find my bartender’s guide.
Mu Mu, I hope you learned a lesson here. Dont ever make a comment on these boards without being certain. Particularly a snide comment.
For the record, I did search, but “shanty” didn’t produce many useful links. Which now makes sense. “It is a damned poor mind indeed, which cannot think of at least two ways to spell any word.” -Andrew Jackson
I wasn’t being snide. And I was quoting The AmericanHeritage Dictionary. I don’t know what Johnny L.A.'s dictionary says, but at least he had the sense to look it up.
Oh, I’m sorry, Mu Mu. I must have misunderstood your intentions. First of all, I’d like to thank you for another post that did not seem at all snide. I have a terrible habit of jumping to conclusions. I see now, however, that you were only trying to be helpful in a friendly way.
I think I told you that I did look it up. However, dictionary.com did not offer “Shandy” as an alternative.
I’ve never had a shandy (although now that I’ve heard of it I will definitely have to try one) but I once lived in a shanty. It was about the size of a shoebox, and the only place my family of nine could find to put our shanty was in the median of a ten-lane superhighway.
Actually, they sell Boomerang up here, which is called “lemonade for grownups”, so I assume it’s sort of shandiesque. but don’t take the teetotaler’s word for it.
They call them “Radlers” here in Germany. A Radler is also bike rider, and the name has something to do with it being a refreshing drink for when you ride your bike. Doesn’t get you too drunk, but hits the spot, something like that. These wacky Germans never heard of Gatorade or plain water.
Of course, I’m the one who got teased at CopeDope for drinking BananaBeer and ColaWeissen so I’ll pretty much drink anything mixed with beer. Kvalluf has the right idea! They also mix them with raspberry syrup and waldmeister syrup (don’t know what that is in English). Mmmmm…waldmeister.
[singing] “I’ll swing my bals to break the walls,”
says Barnacle Bill the Sailor!
"I’ll use my cock to pick the lock, "
says Barnacle Bill the Sailor! [/singing]
Shandy is stil fairly popular as a summer drink in Britain. I know one lad who drinks “lager top” - basically, a pint of lager with about an inch spare at the top topped up with lemonade.
In Canada I had a friend who would only drink beer if it was mixed with Ribena (a blackberry flavoured drink that I (and many other Canadians) had only heard of because of our weird friend who liked a splash of it in her beer). But here in Britain people drink it all the time, feed it to their kids etc … but never, ever in their beer … weird.
Ribena is a blackcurrant squash (are add-water-to-the-syrup drink called ‘squash’ outside the UK?). A popular (well, among stereotyped sad students) drink is Snakebite & Black - a pint of cider with a dash of Ribena. Actually, it might be cider, Pernod and Ribena, or cider, lager and Ribena - I never touched the stuff (smells foul). A Snakebite & Black with a Vodka Depthcharge is self-explanatory, and you can simulate the effect by drinking a pint of Mr Sheen.
