Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Previously, we’ve folded these in to our betting guides, whether that’s been for the NFL slate or a bizarrely successful run through the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Living in Wisconsin has made me intimately familiar with shandies, the beer-lemonade (or other fruit-based beverage) mix that permeates the summer. This is thanks largely to the constant presence of Leinenkugel’s flagship beer in the Badger State. What started out with lemon has now expanded to roughly a dozen flavors, of which maybe three are any good. I remain bitter that for several years I could get an orange shandy (terrible) but couldn’t find Sunset Wheat anywhere (it is, fortunately, coming back this fall).
This left me sorely lacking in radler knowledge, however, until I made the trip out to Munich for Oktoberfest.
Roughly six days in and in desperate need of hydration, I turned to the half-beer, half-soda mix that’s roughly one Euro more per liter than a Diet Coke on its own. My brain, polluted by a mother who’d grown up poor and simultaneously respecting the restorative “hair of the dog” wisdom passed down to me by an older cousin who only drank liquor from plastic bottles, opted for these hybrids in hopes of nursing my body back to half-speed.
This was a wonderful decision, as the helles/lemon-lime tincture not only restored my ability to form (mostly) coherent sentences but also created a calm port inside a stormy stomach tossed by marzens and a diet made up entirely of sausage, sauerkraut, and doner kebab. I rode that horse all the way through the rest of my vacation in Germany. Then I went to Scotland and had the same exact damn problem courtesy of whiskey because I. Do. Not. Learn.
This left a high bar for Schöfferhofer to clear. While it doesn’t say “radler” anywhere on the bottle/can, the description makes it clear this is a beer/”flavored drink” mix and, since it checks in at 2.5 percent ABV and is German well, yep, that’s a radler.
Schöfferhofer sent me a lovely bouquet of these beer/soft drink mixes for a taste test. Let’s see how they are.