“You should do a column on showerbeer,” my wife suggested. “You could talk about grapefruit radlers.”
I realized that not only was it a good idea, but I’d be giving myself a head start, having already talked a little about grapefruit radlers last week. (Whether she intended the connection, well, I’m not sure if she reads my column regularly. But she might have. Hi, honey.) And while I took a stand against strident season-policing last week, this week I come not to bury refreshing summer beers, but to praise them.
Showerbeer is one of those neologisms that feels most natural as a hashtag. It’s a noun and a verb at once, and is fairly self-evident. There are days — and they’re almost always in the heart of summer — when your outdoor workload is such that an immediate shower is necessary. And lest your insides feel envious of your outsides, you indulge in a can of something chuggable and reinvigorating while soaking your bones. Voilà, #showerbeer.
And really, it has to be a can. Yes, there are plenty of beers would be great as showerbeers that are in bottles. The fruity 5 Rabbit Paletas, with its candy-like guava sweetness, or New Glarus’ Berliner Weiss, last brewed in 2015, come to mind...except they’re in that pesky glass bottle, and you don’t want to have to deal with broken glass should the bottle slip from your hand. It’s never a good thing, but especially not while, ahem, #showerdressed.
Fortunately, in this can-focused era of beer, there are plenty of showerbeer options. The award for most bountiful showerbeer product lineup must go to Anderson Valley Brewing Company out of Boonville, Calif. Its series of gose beers (goses? gosen?) are easy to find on store shelves and deliver a tart, salty punch. It’s like grownup Gatorade.
The very solid base gose is called, in typically idiosyncratic Anderson Valley fashion, The Kimmie, the Yink, and the Holy Gose. Blood Orange Gose comes in late summer/early autumn, and supplies of two new entries — Briney Melon (watermelon) and GT (flavors of gin and tonic) — should still be on Madison shelves.
Speaking of the style, while Westbrook Brewing Company doesn’t distribute to the Midwest, if you can snag some cans of this Charleston-area brewer’s excellent Gose by trade or travel, do so. Then, y’know, come home and drink one in the shower. Or hotel showerbeer! That could be a thing.
Tart beers fit the bill well, but so do moderately hoppy beers. Session IPAs are the obvious choice: Founders All Day IPA, Oskar Blues’ Pinner (or hey, the new Passion Fruit Pinner just came out), and Surly Xtra-Citra are surely excellent options. New Glarus now has its cans of Moon Man for your showerbeer (and boat and golf course) needs. Revolution, recently arriving to the Madison market from Chicago, can do you right with Anti-Hero, its flagship IPA.
I keep returning to light fruit beers for my showerbeer selections. One of my favorite summer beers is sadly not available in Wisconsin, but is available in both Minnesota and Illinois: 21st Amendment’s Hell or High Watermelon. Some folks hate it, but those who love it, really love it. I guess you could do something like Founders Rubaeus, now that it’s available in cans. It’s a little rich for a showerbeer, but it’s got major raspberry going on.
And finally we swing back around to those grapefruit radlers. My unquestioned champion of the showerbeer, hailing from Salzburg, Austria: Stiegl Grapefruit Radler. When I implied it was 3% alcohol by volume, I was mostly picking a low number for effect; it’s actually 2%. It’s beer, but just barely. Whether you’ve worked up a lather gardening, mowing the lawn, going for a jog, or just hunting Pokemon, Stiegl Grapefruit Radler (four-packs go for about $10) should be your first showerbeer choice.
Sure, you could drink a Fresca instead. It has zero calories, but, if nothing else, Stiegl’s grapefruit radler comes in a taller, pleasantly sturdy can. The sweetness and carbonation are dialed back a bit from Fresca, resulting in fewer burps per drink. And that little, almost-but-not-quite inconsequential bit of fermentation gives it just enough beeriness to remind you that we’re not talking #showersoda here. It’s #showerbeer, and it is without a doubt summer’s best way to drink in a tiny, wet room.
