How To Pair Your Beer With Your Shower
Want to treat yourself well? You can sit in a jacuzzi with a glass of champagne. Lie in a bubble bath with cucumber slices over your eyes. Or just drink a beer in the shower.
There are few easier ways to pamper yourself than with a delicious shower beer. But what kind of beer should it be? How should water temperature influence beer selection? And if drinking in the shower is so glamorous, what about eating there?
We answer these pressing questions and more this week on The Sporkful podcast:
In the show, listener Max from Denver calls in to ask about eating in the shower, because he has a friend named Gina who eats ICE CREAM SANDWICHES IN THE SHOWER.
Here's an artist's rendition of what that looks like:
I got Gina on the phone and talked to her about her technique.
"You just angle yourself so that the hand holding the ice cream sandwich isn't under the water," she explained. "I learned by doing."
She says meltage isn't a serious concern as long as you keep the sandwich out of the water stream and bring your head to it, instead of the other way around. Outside of one tragic disaster, the ice cream sandwich in the shower has never failed her.
Listen to the podcast for our detailed discussion of her technique and the results of my own independent analysis. I also talk to Elite Truong, Sporkful contributor and thought leader in shower consumption, who shared her recipe for Jalapeno Miso Soup in the Shower.
In this post, I want to elaborate on a topic that I touched on with Max, but that I think merits deeper analysis.
What types of beer go best with what types of shower?
When I choose what beer to drink, 90 percent of the decision is based on the weather. (The other 10 percent is based on whether I've played sports or done manual labor in the past hour.) Roughly speaking, hotter weather means lighter beer, colder weather means heavier, more bitter beer. Sports and manual labor skew things slightly more in the light direction.
Do you see where I'm going? A shower is its own sort of weather system. If it's hot outside and I take a cold shower, should I pair my beer with the hot weather outside, or the cold shower I'm standing in?
(In response to the question you're no doubt asking at this point: Yes, I get paid for this.)
I decided to conduct an experiment. I spent time outside, got very hot, and went to take a cold shower. I brought an IPA (winter), a hefeweizen (summer), and a shandy (really summer). The IPA was much too bitter, but the shandy was actually worse. For that kind of beverage, you need to be hot at the exact moment you're drinking it.
The hefeweizen was the winner.
A few days later I replicated winter by cranking up my AC for a while, then hopped into a hot shower. I brought a hefeweizen (summer), a stout (traditionally winter, although any time the mood strikes for me), and an IPA (pure winter). Again, the winner was the middle option — the stout.
My TL;DR: Pair your beer with your shower temperature more so than with the outside weather — but stay towards the middle of the road beer-wise. You want your beer to pair with your shower, but you don't want it to clash with the weather.
