My dad, who recently had to meet in a restaurant with a group of East Baltimore Shriners, reported that several of them were putting salt in their beer. They explained that they did this because a) it gets rid of the bubbles and b) they like the taste. Are there really that many people out there who enjoy flat, salty beer?
I don’t think the salt makes the beer flat. It just takes away the head. You can do the same thing by running your finger over the foam.
But I’m not a beer drinker and I wouldn’t salt it if I was, so I may be wrong about that.
People do that with Corona sometimes. It isn’t that bad.
Anything to mask the taste of Corona, I suppose. 
Grownups around me salted beer to get rid of the head when I was growing up in the South too. They were drinking stuff like Budweiser and Pabst Blue Ribbon, so it really didn’t matter.
They also occasionally got the same effect by pouring salted peanuts into the bottle or glass and taking in and chewing them a few at time as they drank.
Actually salted bear doesn’t taste bad at all.
Buckskin Bill? Is that you?
Yes, but salted beer is disgusting. On preview, damn you WF Tomba! <shakes fist>
Back when I drank beer in the '70s and '80s, in Canada, there would be a salt shaker on every table in most bars. Beer was salted mainly by older guys, and it was always draft and not bottled beer. One of the best things I’ve ever tasted was walking into a bar out of 100-degree weather and receiving a large Molson Export draft, in a tall glass that had been dunked in water, the rim dipped in salt, and stored in the freezer.
Residue from soap kills beer foam, so bars that do a lousy job washing their glasses would be serving beer without any head. BUT a sneaky bartender can add a pinch of salt to act as nucleation points for the CO2 bubbles to come out of solution. Many bars have some salt on hand for that purpose.
Maybe some people found out that they just liked the taste.
But salted bear served with salted beer, uhhmmmm.
:smack:
When I was little, my brother showed me how to do that trick with cola. Drinking disgusting, salty soda was totally worth the awe of the phenomenon.
I used to see a lot of people putting salt in beer back in Texas in the 1950s. I don’t think the beer was necessarily draft beer; I seem to recall people pouring beer from bottles into glasses and then salting it.
In the first cartoon appearance of Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda is trying to shake salt on his tail (having been told that’s how you catch a bird). Woody then whips out a stein of beer and lets the salt fall on the head. Finally, I understand that gag.
Is something wrong? Why hasn’t anyone asked about Bacon salted beer?
Tecate beer, drank in Juarez or Elpaso, is (in my experience anyway) usually served with a bit of squeezed lime and salt on the rim of the can … it’s very good actually.
Wow. I come from possibly the world’s leading beer drinking nation after Germany (and I suspect the UK these days), and I have never heard of this.
Here, some (older) guys might ask for a “Glass of {brand} with a dash”, which means an ounce or two of lemonade, and in Queensland they sometimes put sarsparilla in their beer (they’re odd up there), but salt? Odd.
Mentioned only for the sake of interest/information exchange and so forth - in the UK, this is a ‘top’ - so ‘lager top’ means nearly a pint of lager, topped up with lemonade (by which we mean lemon soda), ‘bitter top’ is the same, but with bitter. Not sure if anyone does it with other types of beer such as stout (actually, I bet they do).
I was told to do this as a youth to get rid of the head. If my beer has too much head, I would simply prefer to wait patiently rather than put salt in it.
The idea that a head on beer could be seen as a bad thing is utterly alien to me.
And if it’s got too much head, then it was poured carelessly, and I’d wonder if it might be better to drink somewhere else.
If the mixture is half-and-half, is that what’s referred to as a “shandy?”