Beer has always had a somewhat ambiguous place in the American art of mixology. The classic drinks of the American bar—cocktails, slings, juleps, punches, coolers, and the like—were based on spirits and fortified wines, with little place for beer. Of the 230-odd drink recipes in Jerry Thomas’ 1862 How to Mix Drinks, the first ever of its kind and a foundational document for the art, only eight contain beer. (By contrast, a contemporary British manual, with many fewer recipes in total, offers 23.) What’s more, of those eight, all but two were obsolete as American bar drinks, and even those—the Ale Flip (spiced and sweetened ale with rum and eggs) and the Ale Sangaree (basically a flip without the rum or eggs)—were holdovers from an earlier age. There was one place, however, that beer was making its way into bartenders’ drinks at the time: judging by A.V. Bevill’s 1871 Barkeeper’s Ready Reference, sour beer or ale was sometimes used in the “Western Territories” as a substitute for lemon juice.

In a professional mixologist’s hands, the use of beer and ale has certainly progressed since then, but perhaps not as far as its proponents might like. Some of the more creative modern bartenders will sometimes use a gueuze as a souring agent, attempt a variation on a Flip, or round out a long drink with a white ale. Some of the leading bars in the American craft cocktail movement have even gone so far as to have sections of their cocktail menus devoted to beer-based concoctions. The drinks tend to feature all the hallmarks of the movement: handmade ingredients (including such things as ale reduced to a syrup), unusual flavor combinations, and a good deal of technical sophistication. Yet few of these creations, whatever their merits, have gained much traction among drinkers, while the periodic brewing-industry sponsored attempts to promote beer cocktails have yet to succeed in creating a truly popular drink.

On the other hand, beer features prominently in what may be called “folk mixology”: mixology that takes place in the field, without the mediation of a trained bartender. The resulting drinks almost always eschew specialized equipment or techniques and involve only one or two additional ingredients.

While their very simplicity makes it difficult to detail their history and evolution, it is safe to say that the popular American beer drinks at least have older European analogs, if not direct ancestors. For instance, take the 1980s-vintage “Irish Car Bomb,” a pint of stout with a mixed shot of Irish whiskey and Irish cream liqueur dropped in. While it echoes the 17th-century English drink Pop-In (ale with a shot of raw spirits), it also nods to the 19th-century English Dog’s Nose (porter and gin) and the American Depth Charge (a shot glass of whiskey dropped in a mug of beer), without necessarily being derived from any of them. Other drinks, such as the Black Velvet (stout and Champagne) and the Shandy Gaff (ale and ginger beer) are direct imports, the former from Germany and the latter from Britain, and both antedating the Civil War. Yet others are at least North American creations: the United States and Canada might dispute who was the first to mix beer and tomato juice, but whether called a Calgary Red Eye or simply Red Beer, it achieved widespread popularity in both countries in the early 1950s. On the other hand, the Michelada, the up-and-coming beer drink of the 2000s, is from Mexico and is somewhat more elaborate than most folk drinks, combining beer with lime juice, hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and liquid “oriental seasoning.” Less authentically Mexican is the 1970s-vintage Beer Margarita, which mixes equal parts mass-market lager, frozen limeade, and tequila. In fact, with its improvisational use of mass-market ingredients (frozen limeade for fresh limes, beer for Cointreau) and its utter simplicity of execution, this drink is the very model of the popular American beer cocktail.