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Recently, whilst idly jonesin’ for a Tom Collins, I got to
thinking about beer cocktails. I’ve never tasted one, and certainly never tried
making one myself, because why risk a perfectly good beer by the inclusion of
other ingredients that may not work*? But the two trains of thought collided,
and I began to wonder whether I could make a Tom Collins cocktail using a sour
beer. Berliner Weisse might work – those I’ve sampled are full of tart citrus
flavour, albeit with a hoppy background.
In fact, once I’d had the idea, it seemed a rather obvious
one, and I was sure someone else must have got there before me. They may well
have, but when a quick google of the term ‘Tom Collins Berliner Weisse’ brought
no results, I decided I may as well go ahead and document my findings here.
Encouragingly, I went to the pub a couple of days later and found
Londonerweisse, a collaboration between Beavertown, Dogfish Head and the East
London Liquor Company which infuses gin botanicals into a Berliner Weisse. If
I’m honest, I couldn’t get much of those gin flavours from the nonetheless very
tasty beer, but it confirmed I was on the right track.
In preparation, I experimented with the regular Tom Collins,
adapting some recipes I found online. Most were either too pungently boozy or a
little too sharp, but after some tinkering I settled on 40ml gin, 35 sugar
syrup and 50ml lemon juice (juice of roughly one and half lemons) over crushed
ice. These ratios gave me the foundations for further tweaking in the beery
version I’d be trying.
The obvious change to make was the sugar syrup. Having ended
up using almost twice what some Tom Collins recipes recommended, I revealed my
sweet tooth. But whilst an old German tradition used flavoured syrups to sweeten Berliner weisse’s tart edge, it is usually drunk straight and shouldn’t
require as much sweetness to balance it as lemon juice, which can’t be drunk
straight without this happening. So, with a
bottle of Buxton’s Far Skyline and Hendrick’s gin to hand, I set about an
evening of blundering beery mixology.
I put much less ice in the glass than I had with my
traditional Tom Collins’ (to make room for more beer) and mixed 45ml gin, 10ml
sugar syrup and 100ml beer. Sadly it was too sweet, and also just a little
bland; I added a squeeze of lemon to liven it up and this was passable. It didn’t
taste like a Tom Collins, but it was a decent, refreshing drink in its own
right. The second attempt used the same measures of beer and gin, but no sugar
syrup. Minus the cloying sweetness, this was instantly better, but a dash of
fresh lemon still improved it. The floral notes in the gin (and Hendricks is a
particularly floral example) really came through, reminding me a little of
sparkling elderflower, and the lightness of the drink with the slight citrus
tang was reminiscent of Prosecco.
Am I converted to beer cocktails? Not really. It was fun
messing about with the recipe, and the final drink I came up with was very
enjoyable, and something I might revive for summer evenings. But my slightly
underwhelming conclusion is that the final third of the bottle of Far Skyline,
which I drank on its own, was the most enjoyable part of this little adventure.
* Although I'd like to try this one from Melissa Cole.
