It is an absolute jungle out there in the world of beer. Seemingly every day there is a new brewery that pops up with offerings ranging from simple yet elegant, to more exotic and complex. Walking into a local bottle shop can be wrought with anxiety if one lacks the necessary intellectual machete to hack through the thickets that is the jungle of bottles.
The nice thing about beer cocktails is that because one is mixing various other ingredients into them, one needn’t fuss about having an über fancy brew to throw into their delicious cocktail!
So in an attempt to earn my “stripes” by bringing the readers more deliciousness to try, I had to step gingerly, literally.
I started with Tiger beer, a light lager from Singapore that has a flavor profile typical of Asian beers. Being just a touch on the high side in regard to the carbonation, Tiger beer lent itself beautifully to the addition of other ingredients. The other ingredients included a half ounce of lemon juice, and one ounce of Domaine de Canton, a super-premium ginger liqueur that has been enhanced with grande champagne cognacs.
Now this isn’t your kitty’s normal saucer of milk. The full-bodied mouth feel of the ginger liqueur added an incredibly rich flavor and texture to the cocktail, making it a mouth soothing aperitif which I was definitely going to need!
Going from one extreme to the other, I decided to put the soothing qualities of the ginger/beer cocktail to the test, a trial by fire of sorts. A friend of mine who knows my affinity for culinary hotness recently brought me a jar of habañero carrot curry from a local farmers market. Touted as an exotic blend of heat and sweet, this seemed like a good pairing considering ginger is commonly used medicinally to treat various types of “stomach problems”; and when messing with this much heat one can never be too careful!
Mixing the curry in with cubed yams, coconut milk, peanuts, carrots, and of course chicken and rice, the flavorful dish did not disappoint. The sweat that was building on my brow from the heat of the curry was easily forgotten as sips of this delicious beer cocktail splashed passed my seemingly melting teeth to keep the heat at bay in between bites. In the end the combination was a success, the polar opposites of the flavors of the beer cocktail and the curry dish played off of one another quite nicely.
So if you’re looking for a smooth drink to mellow out your incendiary culinary dish, or just looking for a great beverage to sip on, this one is definitely the cat’s pajamas. So dip into the kitty, get your paws on some Tiger beer, and see what the cat drags in!
