Summer Shandycakes

Sorry for the lapse in posting - I should set up some sort of consistent schedule. Moving and  Trinker and other things have been getting in the way. That's okay, though - this blog isn't really for anyone except myself. If people read it and enjoy it, all the better.

The latest installment comes to you from the land of summer drinks - a time where beers get a little lighter and hoppier, and try to provide that cool, crisp refreshment on a hot summery day. The weapon of choice this time is Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, a beer that I wouldn't normally own/drink, but happened to be left over from a sampler I got for a party (I think). That same sampler actually gave birth to this blog in the form of Leinie's Summer Wheat, so the Shandy'll be good, too, right? Right???

For those that are unfamiliar with Leinie's or with shandy, it's basically a light beer with a tiny fruit twist. In Leinie's case, it's a bit more of a fruit twist than I'd like, and the fruit is lemon, which makes it very easy to overpower the taste of the beer itself. Not my favorite thing to drink, but we need to get rid of it somehow, right? To the pancake batter!

Shand-tastic!

For some reason I don't have a ton of pictures on this one, but the pancakes turned out pretty...okay. Nothing spectacular, nothing interesting, really. The overly sweetened lemon in the beer mellowed out quite a bit, but there was still an odd twinge of lemon aftertaste in the pancake, which turned out to be kind of odd. Think unsweetened iced tea - that sort of lemony twinge. The batter looked pretty typical, too:

Shandycakes on the right. Notice the normal batter on the left? Blame my girlfriend.

Results:

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that a beer without a ton of flavor or anything special to it created pancakes that didn't have a ton of flavor or anything special to them. On the plus side, the pancakes were easier to eat than the beer would've been to drink in its native form, so, victory? At the very least, they weren't terrible, so in the interest of exploration, I'd chalk this one up in the W column. Certainly not something I'd go out of my way to repeat, but if I had to get rid of some Summer Shandy, this is my weapon of choice.

Is Summer Shandy right up your alley, or is it too much like Kool-Aid for you? Do you think there's something better to do with it? Disagree with our take on it? Leave us a comment!