Memories of shandy punctuate my life like too many commas in a run-on sentence [nice dig at my editing—Ed]. Possibly the very first ‘alcoholic’ beverage I ever drank was a Barr Shandy. For those that have never had the pleasure, it’s a 10:1 ratio of beer to lemonade, making it less than 0.5% and thus legal to sell to under 18s in the UK, which is why it’s sold as a soft drink, alongside cola, ginger beer and iron brew in the supermarket.

At seven years old it felt incredibly grown up to go into the local sweet shop after school with my jingling pocket full of silver coins and pull one out of the fridge. Similar low alcohol shandies, blended by bartenders in local pubs at very low strength, would be bought for me by parents throughout my childhood, (perhaps slightly stronger with a bartender willing to not ask who the drink was for.)

I have so many fond recollections of sitting in sun drenched beer gardens, a fizzy yellow shandy washing down the sharp acidity of a packet of Seabrooks salt and vinegar crisps (a true treat, we only had supermarket own-brand crisps at home):

A school trip to Germany aged 14 where the teachers allowed us to drink shandies in the family run hotel bar when we ate dinner. The schnitzel and frankfurters perfectly complemented the mix of fresh German lager and cloudy lemonade.

Barbeques in Leazes Park in my student days, burnt sausages on cheap disposable aluminium trays spitting up more smoke than heat. Mixing cheap skunked French lager in green stubby bottles with an overly sweet diet lemonade. Mana from heaven.

My first homebrew, a golden ale kit beer, was as flat as a pancake because I had missed the line in the instructions about priming sugar. No matter, I bought 10 big bottles of lemonade and shandied the lot of it.

Roast beef melting in mouth, creamy mashed potatoes and gigantic crispy Yorkshire puddings all drowned in a river of gravy at Wylam brewery. Wetting my whistle with shandied Jakehead, the bitterness of the IPA softened, dancing with the sourness of the lemonade.

Pondering this article after two hours strimming and mowing back my jungle of a back garden, arms cuts to ribbons from thorns and nettle stings, dizzy from sunstroke sat in my garden chair and guzzling down this homebrewed shandy like a snake swallowing its prey whole.

Sitting in the beer garden of Ye Olde Cross Pub in picturesque leafy green Ryton village, treating myself to a trip after submitting the first draft of this article. I’m chugging down a refreshing shandied Ossett Brewery pale ale in the baking hot sun as a lady sitting nearby says to her partner about her own drink: “You know what? Sometimes a shandy is just lovely.”

Over the summer I wanted something lower in alcohol to enjoy in the sunshine and decided to indulge my nostalgia and make my own all-in-one shandy homebrew. It's ideal for a homebrewer generally in that making a batch of forty pints can sometimes be hard to get through especially if it’s a big beer like an imperial stout, but at 2% you can smash through a batch of homebrew shandy without issue.

Shandy has seen something of a resurgence in recent years. Big brands like Fosters Shandy can be seen lining the supermarket shelves, while brands like Schöfferhofer (which is owned by frozen pizza specialist Dr. Oetker) have become cult favourites in the UK. The latter even releases seasonal, limited edition flavours like Pineapple, Watermelon Mint and Prickly Pear. There’s even brands that are entirely dedicated to making shandy, such as the Oxfordshire based Shandy Shack.

““Over the summer I wanted something lower in alcohol to enjoy in the sunshine.””

Shandies and radlers, whilst technically having their own definitions, are both mixtures of beer and fruit juice have an intersection in that a lager base with lemonade is both a shandy and a radler (Fosters Shandy was originally released as Fosters Radler, and I would bet my last fiver the recipe hasn’t changed at all). A shandy can have a different beer base (bitter shandy being an absolute banger) but a radler is limited to either a German lager or wheat beer style base.

Conversely, a shandy should really use lemonade as its soft drink element, whereas a radler can utilise a wide variety of fruit mixers, as indicated by the wizards at Schofferhofer. That said, Shandy Shack has a ‘Ginger Beer Shandy’ so the definition isn’t necessarily as fixed as the hardcore shandy fundamentalists that I’m sure exist on some weird part of the internet would like it to be. Maybe the one rule with shandy is actually: there are no rules!

What is behind this resurgence? I mean shandies are brilliant, they’re delicious, refreshing and just intoxicating enough to give you a little buzz, but presenting a refreshing lower alcohol option if you don’t want something stronger. But I would say the big driver in the resurgence is nostalgia. Studies have shown we remember smells and flavours more strongly than our other senses. Images and sounds warp and change as we re-remember them, but our memories of taste are a lot more prominent, more permanent.

The recipe is quite simple. I halved the malt I would usually put in for lager, resulting in a shandy appropriate strength. In terms of hops I used a little bit of Nugget for a neutral bitterness and Lemondrop for flavour and aroma, which unsurprisingly is lemon in character, to complement the lemon juice and peel.

The only thing that is missing from the finished brew is some of the sweetness from the sugar you would get from lemonade. You can’t really add this in when brewing as the yeast would just ferment it into more alcohol, but you can add a teaspoon of sugar or sugar syrup when serving. (Leave some headroom in your glass and be cautious, the sugar can cause the shandy to foam up when added!)

If you decide to indulge in a nostalgic beverage adventure and make your own homebrew shandy please drop us a line and let us know!

***

Recipe

Target Original Gravity (OG) — 1.024
Target Final Gravity (FG) — 1.004
Target Alcohol by Volume (ABV) — 2.3%
Target International Bittering Units (IBU) — 20
Batch Size — 23L

Ingredients

2Kg Pilsner Malt

20g Nugget at start of boil
50g Lemondrop 5 minutes from end of boil

1 Pack Mangrove Jack’s California Lager Yeast

12 Lemons and 50g Lemondrop for Dry Hop. (Add 3 days after brewday and leave in for 10 days.)

25L Water total (5L for mash, 20L for sparge)

(Carefully peel the skin from the lemons, making sure you don’t take the white pith. I’ve found a potato peeler does the job really well and then juice the lemons. Add the lemon juice, lemon peel and Lemondrop hops all together as a dry hop)

Method

Mash Duration — 1 Hour
Mash Liquor Volume — 5L
Total Grist Weight — 2Kg
Liquor to Grist Ratio — 2.5L/Kg
Mash Temperature — 65ºC
Sparge Liquor Volume — 20L
Sparge Liquor Temperature — 72ºC
Boil Duration — 1 Hour
Fermentation Temp — 18ºC