Radler

The name means 'cyclist' (from Rad, 'wheel/bicycle'), and the popular origin story credits innkeeper Franz Kugler of the Kugleralm in Deisenhofen, just south of Munich. On a hot June day in 1922, so the story goes, thousands of cyclists arrived along a bike path Kugler had cut through the woods to his inn; running low on beer, he stretched it with lemon soda and named the half-and-half pour Radlermass ('cyclist's litre'). Beer cut with fizzy lemonade is documented in Germany before this — references appear as early as 1912 — so Kugler is better understood as the man who popularised and named the drink than as its sole inventor. In northern Germany the same idea is often called Alsterwasser, after Hamburg's Alster lake.

Pale straw-gold and lightly fizzy, much paler than the lager it started as. The first sip is sweet-citrus up front, then a faint malt body underneath, with the beer's bitterness almost gone. It drinks like a grown-up lemonade rather than a beer — light enough to down in long pulls on a hot day. Served cold in a half-litre mug or a tall glass, no foam ceremony required.

There is no cooking — the drink is built by dilution, and the ratio is the whole technique. Cutting lager roughly 1:1 with sweetened lemon soda halves the alcohol and the bitterness in one move: the soda's sugar and citric acid mask the hop bitterness on the palate, while the carbonation keeps it lively. Pour the soda first and the beer on top, or pour gently down the side, to avoid a runaway foam head. Use a crisp, clean lager rather than a hoppy or dark beer, and a real lemon soda rather than cola, or it stops tasting like a Radler.