Shandy

A refreshing blend of beer and lemonade, perfect for long afternoons and sessionable sipping.

The Shandy traces its roots to 19th-century Britain, where it was originally called a shandygaff — a blend of beer and ginger beer or ginger ale. The earliest printed record of the word appears in Edward Bradley's 1853 comic novel The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, where a student boasts of learning to make one alongside the fashionable Sherry Cobbler. Charles Dickens, a contemporary of the drink's rise, described shandygaff as the perfect alliance between beer and pop. By 1888 the London Daily News had shortened the name to shandy, and the original ginger mixer had largely given way to sparkling lemonade as the preferred blend. The German equivalent, the Radler (meaning cyclist), has its own origin story: in 1922, a Bavarian innkeeper named Franz Xaver Kugler reportedly stretched his beer supply for a large group of arriving cyclists by mixing it with lemon soda, inadvertently creating a beloved variation that spread across German-speaking Europe. Today the shandy is enjoyed across the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa, and continues to be one of the most sessionable warm-weather drinks in the world. In the United States it gained modern mainstream recognition through brands like Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, introduced in 1997 and now one of the best-selling seasonal beers in the country. The shandy belongs to a broader tradition of beer cocktails that also includes the Michelada, the Chelada, and the Black Velvet — proof that beer has always been fair game for mixing.