OK, everywhere I mention this I get all kinds of disgusted reactions. I don't care. It's one of the great beer-based pleasures in life and if I'm the only one doing it, that's fine. (Actually, a little googling shows that others are doing it, but mostly as a hangover cure.)
When I was a kid I remember my dad drinking red beer (I don't know what ratio of tomato juice to beer he was using, but I like it very tomato-y) out of frosty mugs. I think I also remember him drinking it in bars sometimes. (In Montana, at least in those days, kids could be in bars.) When I reached legal age I would sometimes order it (mostly in eastern Washington and northern Idaho) and no bartender ever blinked an eye. If I drank only red beer, even if I attained near-blind levels of drunkenness, I'd have little to no hangover.
Whenever I tried ordering it in the midwest, however, all I got was a blank stare, or a beer with the word red in the name.
Now, red beer may indeed be good for curing hangovers, and it is good for avoiding them, but perhaps its greatest value lies in the ability to put flavor into really crappy beer. I've even been able to enjoy Rolling Rock this way, for example.
Anyway, to bring this around to homebrew related topics, I cooked up a batch of tomato juice yesterday (tomatoes plus garlic, some mild peppers, some basil, pepper, a fair amount of salt and ... a few cones of my homegrown hops (there's the homebrew part). Later, once it was ice cold, I had a red beer (the beer was Shiner Bock). Best red beer I ever had, thanks to that homemade tomato juice (I've had Shiner Bock red beer recently, but with store-bought juice and it was just average).
I couldn't really taste the hops, so next time I'm going to add more to see if I can get it to a point where a non-hoppy beer, properly reddened, becomes hoppy. Who knows--it might even make a "triple-hopped" bottle of yellowish soda water taste like it's been hopped. And tomatoed.
Oh, by the way, I never put tomato juice in really good beer. I don't think that would work.
Anyone ever added hops to anything non-beer, but which gets added to beer?
Anyone else drink red beer?
Gunnar
When I was a kid I remember my dad drinking red beer (I don't know what ratio of tomato juice to beer he was using, but I like it very tomato-y) out of frosty mugs. I think I also remember him drinking it in bars sometimes. (In Montana, at least in those days, kids could be in bars.) When I reached legal age I would sometimes order it (mostly in eastern Washington and northern Idaho) and no bartender ever blinked an eye. If I drank only red beer, even if I attained near-blind levels of drunkenness, I'd have little to no hangover.
Whenever I tried ordering it in the midwest, however, all I got was a blank stare, or a beer with the word red in the name.
Now, red beer may indeed be good for curing hangovers, and it is good for avoiding them, but perhaps its greatest value lies in the ability to put flavor into really crappy beer. I've even been able to enjoy Rolling Rock this way, for example.
Anyway, to bring this around to homebrew related topics, I cooked up a batch of tomato juice yesterday (tomatoes plus garlic, some mild peppers, some basil, pepper, a fair amount of salt and ... a few cones of my homegrown hops (there's the homebrew part). Later, once it was ice cold, I had a red beer (the beer was Shiner Bock). Best red beer I ever had, thanks to that homemade tomato juice (I've had Shiner Bock red beer recently, but with store-bought juice and it was just average).
I couldn't really taste the hops, so next time I'm going to add more to see if I can get it to a point where a non-hoppy beer, properly reddened, becomes hoppy. Who knows--it might even make a "triple-hopped" bottle of yellowish soda water taste like it's been hopped. And tomatoed.
Oh, by the way, I never put tomato juice in really good beer. I don't think that would work.
Anyone ever added hops to anything non-beer, but which gets added to beer?
Anyone else drink red beer?
Gunnar