Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week’s Cocktail, Boilermakers!

Belly up.

I might have pre-gamed the boilermaker with another beer.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. My wife’s away for work on weekends this fall, which gives me a chance to go out and hit some bars on my “to-visit” list. Last weekend I swung by Happy Dog, “a neighborhood corner bar in the best sense of the term,” and had one of the great cocktails a place like this deserves. Belly up to the bar, folks. Let’s have a boilermaker or two. Here’s what to order (“recipe” is too fancy a word):

Boilermaker

12 oz Miller High Life (1 can)

2 oz Jim Beam (1 shot)

Drink the beer. Drink a little more. Drink the Jim Beam all in one go. Drink the rest of the beer.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Happy Dog isn’t a dive bar. It’s got all the decor and charm of a dive, but the food is much too good for it to be called a “dive.” Dive bars don’t do food. Dive bars toss mysterious things into the fryer and hand them to you in a basket lined with waxed paper. (Ghost Bar in New Orleans? Total dive, great place, try the chicken cracklings.) Happy Dogs has hot dogs and tots, but the toppings … well, they run the gamut from gourmet to lowbrow. If you ever wanted to have Froot Loops on top of your hot dog, here’s the place. I had some tater tots with black truffle honey mustard dipping sauce. I had no idea truffles and cheap beer were so good together.

But let’s talk drinks for a moment. The boilermaker — a shot and a beer — has been around for a very long time. For most of that time, it didn’t have a name; it was just “a shot and a beer.” Somewhere around the 1800s, the combo picked up the name “boilermaker.” Rumor has it that it came from railroad workers who put away a few of these after a hard day’s work. There are some more extravagant stories of exploding trains and drunk engineers, but I’m pretty sure that the name just sprouted up organically over time. At a “real” dive bar, calling it a boilermaker would be fairly pretentious. “Shot and a beer” is just fine.

The drink itself is evergreen, but how you drink a boilermaker has changed over time. Before the turn of the century, you’d chug the beer, down the shot, and order another one. But as boilermakers have found their way onto craft cocktail menus, things have gotten a little more refined. These days, you sip on the beer, sip on the booze, and let the flavors of both interplay with one another. Cobra’s menu lists a carefully curated selection of boilermakers. (Cobra is another amazing corner bar in Columbus, recently voted one of the best bars in America.) The offerings run from a can of Hamm’s and a shot of Fernet, to a Mexican lager paired with Patron, to a Taiwan beer and a very pricey shot of sake — $42 for that one.

Amazingly, boilermakers really do work as a genteel, culinary drink. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The hearty maltiness of American lager mellows out with a shot of sweet, thick bourbon. It’s like butter on toast — simple, but satisfying.

There is so much that’s so satisfying about going to a corner bar like this. Especially on nights when there’s live music. There’s something magical about sitting in the corner of a tatty old bar, listening to a screaming vocalist, shredding guitars, and a drummer trying his best to keep up. The music isn’t good, but it’s loud, and it’s real. Nothing around you is digitized; phones fall away. The news stops mattering. You’re headbanging in unison with the rest of the crowd. Everything is analog. Welcome back to the real world. It’s been a long time.

Let’s talk ingredients — more specifically, how to order a solid boilermaker at the bar:

Pinball shot. That Elvis lamp is legend.

Beer: If you’re new to the game, start simple. Miller High Life, Coors Banquet, or Budweiser are all excellent starting points. Hamm’s or PBR are also solid choices. DO NOT ORDER AN IPA. Likewise, pumpkin spice beers are right out. Think regional — if you’re at a cheap Mexican joint, a Modelo and a shot of tequila will get a thumbs-up from behind the stick. Snooty beers are worthy of scorn if you’re pairing them with a shot.

Shot: Don’t get fancy. Stay true to the blue-collar roots of the boilermaker. Cheap bourbon is a solid option. Jim Beam is a great starting point. Jack Daniel’s is a classic, but I’m not a fan (sorry, Lemmy). A shot of Jameson paired with Guinness is an instant classic. Tequila and Mexican beer are great together. And, of course, everything goes with Fernet-Branca.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by, and I’ll make a drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette. We’ll make it through this together.

OPEN THREAD!