Make Your Margarita a Beer Margarita

Beer is good. Margaritas are good. Why not combine them?

This has been a very, very hot week in Washington, D.C. Stepping outside during the afternoon felt like stepping into a giant open-air sauna, or possibly a simmering vat of donut glaze. It’s been hot. Stupid hot. This is not the time for a Manhattan. 

When it’s this hot out, there are really only two things I want to drink: Margaritas — and beer. As it turns out, there’s a great way to combine the two. 

Last week’s drink was relatively complex, even in modified, simplified form. That will happen from time to time in this newsletter — home bartenders should learn how to make complex drinks! — but I also want to write about cocktails that should be accessible to most anyone. 

So this week we’re going to make a relatively simple crowd pleaser: a Beer Margarita. 

There are a couple of tricks involved: you’ll need to use salt, pick the right beer, and slightly restructure the underlying Margarita that the beer modifies. But for the most part, it’s exactly what it sounds like — a Margarita made with beer. 

Make Your Margarita a Highball 

The best way to think of the Beer Margarita is as a kind of dressed-up highball. The most basic highball, of course, is just a spirit topped with soda water. The definitional highball is the scotch and soda, in which the scotch is stretched out through carbonated water. 

But as with any class of cocktails, you can vary the ingredients and add complexity to create a wide array of additional drinks, some of which you are almost certainly already familiar with.