Hello, and welcome back to Vintage Cocktail Friday! Quite possibly the most requested and least posted blog posts on this blog! Sorry about that. This year has been kind of crazy and we just haven’t had time to post the cocktails we are drinking. Plus, it’s hard to take pictures of cocktails if you drink them too fast. But I am going to to better, promise.
In any case, back to the drinks.
This is Tom Girl!
AuthorRetroRuth
From 2 in 1 International Recipe Card Collection, 1977
Tested Recipe!
[cooked-sharing]
Fill pilsner or highball glass halfway up with tomato juice; add 1/2 tablespoon Angostura bitters. Fill with beer and garnish with lemon slice.
Ingredients
Directions
Fill pilsner or highball glass halfway up with tomato juice; add 1/2 tablespoon Angostura bitters. Fill with beer and garnish with lemon slice.
Notes
This is another recipe from the very excellent 2 in 1 International Recipe Card Collection. Of all my cocktail recipe collections, this is one of my favorites. It not only has interesting and varied cocktails, but lots of fun vintage recipes to go with them.
But you can’t just run off and mix tomato juice and just any beer. And so it’s one of Tom’s favorites, PBR.
And a half a tablespoon of bitters.
Here we go. Half a tablespoon. For one drink. Here we go.
Here we go.
Fancy pinky.
“So, how is it?”
“That’s an…odd flavor.”
“Is it bad?”
“I…don’t think so. It’s hard to explain. Sort of meaty. Also, I think my mouth is getting numb. I’m not going to be able to taste anything for the rest of the night.”
The Verdict: Bitters
From The Tasting Notes –
This was an interesting one. It wasn’t bad, but the flavor was a little crazy. You could very much taste the bitters. The lemon was essential to the drink. Without the lemon, it would be undrinkable. If you are from Wisconsin, the taste of this was sort of like drinking your beer chaser at the same time as your bloody mary. If you are going to make this, make sure you use a light beer. If you are going to use a dark beer, you need to cut back on the bitters. Or leave them out entirely.
That would have been a fun discussion. “Hmm, we want to call one a Tom Girl….. let’s add bitters! A LOT OF BITTERS!!!!”
I know, right? Are they trying to say something???
Someone once served me beer and Clamato juice. I don’t like either separately; together, I couldn’t choke it down.
Maybe the person who made the recipe had recently been dumped by a girl named Thomasina?
We have this REALLY great party every winter, The Annual Beer Tasting & Chili Bash. I make a 44 quart batch of The World’s Best Chili (she said, modestly), and people bring sides and a six-pack of the most unusual beer they can find. (This used to be quite the challenge 22 years ago when the whole shebang started. These days, not at all.) The deal is, you get to open anything you want to try – lots of little tasting cups – or just drink the whole thing when you find something that tickles your fancy.
I had to tell you all that to tell you this – a few years ago someone brought Budweiser with tomato juice. Bottled that way. (Actually, canned that way.) I could not bring myself to put it in my mouth.
It exists. https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/29/37389/
:p
My former BIL said that when he was in ‘Nam, they would drink beer + tomato juice, in lieu of bloody marys. Their name for the concoction was “bloody shame.”
tom needs to try the new microbrews although with pbr it might be an improvement
We call beer and tomato juice a Poor Man’s Bloody.
We call beer + tomato juice “red beer.” We, as in you can walk into restaurants here in Denver and order red beer without getting funny looks. I personally wouldn’t, but I’ve seen it done.
Do you think it might have been a typo for one tablespoon?
TEASPOON. Dang me!