Notes on the theory and practice of the shandy, the michelada, and 10 other beer adulterations.

I strongly recommend experimenting with shandy adaptations. The alliance over ice of an I.P.A. and a gourmet grapefruit soda will fortify your yuppie picnic. But maybe you’re playing around with something less rarified, like the Broadway, a combo of lager and Coca-Cola, which is full of brightly bitter surprises. In that case, use a beer that is neither conspicuously awesome nor flagrantly crappy. Red Stripe works nicely, and you will be thankful, as day spills into evening, that its squat bottle has a low center of gravity.

Beware of mixing lager and tonic if you’re in a fragile mood. Its bitterness is nothing less than poignant. A member of the beer-cocktail tasting panel I assembled described the Tonic Shandy as “something you would drink, alone, in the tropics while thinking about that woman you really should have written a letter to before it was too late.”

The point should be obvious, but we would be remiss not to state outright that the lightness of the shandy recommends it as a summertime refreshment. Like (4) the Cincinnati Cocktail—one part muscular microbrew, one part chilled soda water, no ice, all good—it’s good for when you want to spend the whole afternoon in the sun drinking while keeping your wits about you. It’s also good for when you just spent the whole afternoon in the sun drinking and need to ease up before—“Oh, oooh, really sorry. Let me pay for [the next round/the cleaning bill/the cost of pet cremation].”

Let us briefly lurch down Mexico-way to consider the (5) Michelada and similar drinks such as the Chelada and the Chavela.

Translating michelada, we encounter a diminutive endearment: My little cold one, it chimes, in a tone indicating that you should cherish its vivid assembly of lime juice, seasoning, salt, and Mexican lager. Perhaps this explains why people who get dogmatic about the drink—quibbling over nuances regarding Maggi and Worcestershire sauces—tend toward possessiveness and protectiveness. Many people have many opinions about when a michelada can be called a michelada, but none deny that whatever you call it, it tastes best served at a resort-hotel swim-up bar.

The matter of adding tomato juice to a Mexican beer, as in a Cerveza Preparada, brings us to the matter of (6) Red Beer, also known as Red Eye: beer mixed with tomato juice. Jane and Michael Stern put a few away in Oregon for their book Two for the Road, and report that “the exact ratio can vary from an effervescent five to one, in which the beer is merely flavored, to a two-to-one mix as fruity as a drink in a health-food juice bar.” (Similar drinks include Red Rooster, Tomboy, Bloody Beer, Red Eye à la Cocktail, The Brutus and the kinetic Ugly.)

Red beer, made in the spiceless traditional fashion, isn’t terribly thrilling, but it has a certain country-club appeal, a cheerful WASP calm. Goes well with Triscuits, spills well on tennis whites.

In its brunchiness, the red beer bears some relation to the (7) Beermosa, which is perfectly self-explanatory and only mildly gross.

This brings us to (8) the Boilermaker—beer with a shot of whiskey in it—but are we sure we want to go there? Its name is redolent of Rust Belt bars serving 50-cent beers at 10 in the morning. Its tradition embraces the Beer Buster (beer with vodka and Tabasco) and the Dog’s Nose (beer with gin in it). (Actually, the Dog’s Nose might not count, as it dates from an era when Londoners put gin in everything.)

The uncountable number of variations on the basic boilermaker points us to a law of human nature: Anything that can be put in beer will be put in beer, including peaty scotches, fruity liqueurs, and other beers.

But this is not the place to get bogged down discussing the depth charges, car bombs, and theatrical bad ideas with which young people amuse themselves—except to note that a teenager banging a table in a sushi restaurant to detonate a sake bomb is continuing a distinctive undistinguished tradition. Here is David Wondrich in The Oxford Companion to Beer: “Beer features prominently in what may be called ‘folk mixology’: mixology that takes places in the field, without the mediation of a trained bartender.” We are talking, in other words, about traditions passed along orally at dive bars and in off-campus undergraduate housing, in a manner similar to, and indeed sometimes coincident with, herpes of the mouth. In the 21^st century, thank goodness, the Internet collects such knowledge, so that an anthropologist stumbling across Urban Dictionary can discover an improbably heavenly concoction called the Orange Blastaphon (three parts wheat beer, one part gin, one part Fresca or Wink or Squirt): “Sounds terrible but it is actually refreshingly delicious.”

Wondrich cites the 1970s-style (9) Beer Margarita, equal parts cheap beer, frozen limeade concentrate, and tequila, as the “very model of the popular American beer cocktail," but I respectfully wonder whether that distinction more properly belongs to (10) The Skip and Go Naked.