I guess I’m officially old now, i feel like I’ve heard stories of old men diluting their beer with water. I was catching up on some old boak and bailey blog posts and saw them mention that certain IPAs mixed with water emulate cask IPA and bitter. I tried with bells two hearted and it was a reasonable substitute for cask IPA at 12oz beer and 4oz tap water. I’ve tried it with more modern IPAs and didn’t love it but for an old school IPA it comes close enough to cask.
Has anyone tried this? Any beers it works well with?
That’s an old Charlie Papazian trick. I loved his idea for “QuarterBock”. Basically it was a 5 gallon beer of Doppel Bock where one gallon was pulled aside and diluted with 3 gallons of deaerated and carbonated water (and drank on Saturdays or Sundays during football season – hence the name). I had forgotten about that until just now. But it is such a great idea.
Fizzy water is a good idea. I can only fit 3 kegs in my keezer right now but a bigger freezer is in my list to pick up this summer. Wouldn’t mind having some non beer things on tap.
I recently started adding water to the glass when I discovered my “lite” lager still has too much flavor. And now with the heat of summer, for any style where I want chuggability, I will likely water it down, just a little bit.
I used to have a boss who would order a Miller Lite and a water. He’d drink half the beer, fill the glass back up with water and drink through it. His explanation: you get more beer that way.
Maybe that was his way of slowing down his drinking around certain people because he was well known to get tanked regularly.