If the closest you’ve come to dressing your beer is wrapping it in a stylish koozie, hold onto your hats because you’re about to experience a level of flavor in drinking that will blow you away. That said, it’s very likely that you have experienced this phenomenon before without realizing it. So what exactly does it mean to dress a beer and how can it improve your drinking game? Food Republic asked Brandon Pierce, operations manager at the Brickyard Hollow brewery in Maine, and he gave us the goods.
“At a very basic level, dressing a beer is just adding a garnish or some other ingredients, much like you would a cocktail,” he explained. This can take many forms, some of which will be more familiar than others. “The most common type of dressed beer is a Mexican-dressed beer. Salt the rim (preferably with lime juice) and add a lime wedge garnish.”
Salt can actually be used as a dressing in a variety of ways, according to Pierce. “Another old-school dressing that you might see in dives or working-class bars is shaking salt into your domestic lager of choice.” This is a foolproof method to make cheap beer taste better — since salt enhances the positive sensory intake of flavors, adding it to beer to make the flavors pop, just as you would a salad or pasta dish, just makes sense.
Going beyond the salt rim
However, the salt-beer combination is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are far more involved, and delicious, versions as well. The most common of these is probably the michelada. “A michelada is another dressed beer that goes a step further from the Mexican dressing and adds some combination of hot sauce, peppers, or tomato juice,” according to Brandon Pierce, who considers it the non-hard alcohol equivalent of a bloody Mary. You can take your michelada dressing a step further with a chamoy fruit drizzle, a sweet, slightly gelatinous spice-and-fruit combination popular on both fruit and drinks.
When it comes to what flavors to season the beer with, it’s all about matching ingredients to variety. A splash of orange juice can amplify a wheat beer or light pale ale if you start with a ratio of four parts beer to one part OJ. “If you’ve got a bitter beer, say an IPA, you might find something resembling a Negroni by adding Campari or some other bitter amaro,” says Pierce. “I’ve also seen a pastry stout (not typically a dressed style) with a sugar-frosted rim with sprinkles and a slice of donut on the rim.” The reason stout isn’t as typical as a dressed beer, according to Pierce, is that beers that center on strong hop or malt flavors run the risk of overpowering the dressing.
