Green Beer and Blarney

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

If you're caught downtown in a major or close-to-major city on March 17th, you'll be seeing lots of green. Although St. Patrick was neither from Ireland (try Wales) nor responsible for the many legends told about him, on March 17th we celebrate all things Irish here in the United States.

St. Paddy's Day was, for hundreds of years, a quiet little party-time in Ireland; leave it to we Americans to turn it into a explosive green boozefest with parades and pinching and eloquent speeches ("blarney") inspired by the lack of self-censorship that frequently abides a few pints of Guinness. Experts on the Tubes report that as a consequence of America exporting its Irish zeal back to Ireland, more beer is consumed in that country on St. Patrick's Day than any other day of the year.

Let's face it: American hegemony in the world is not of the political sort these days; it's of the partying sort! We export our fun as film, blue-jeans, and especially as music. I hear Mardi Gras is traveling now to other parts of the world, as is our penchant for lamp-shade party hats and stoned-out games of Frisbee golf. But the world owes perhaps its greatest debt to those creative Irish-Americans who invented the most glorious potent potable of all time: green beer!

Now, truth be told this week's column is a self-challenge: could I actually write 500-800 words on green beer? What is there to say about green beer? To rise to the challenge, I did a little research on the history of green beer. Where did it come from? Who invented it? I could find no credible evidence to suggest an origin, except that green beer was most certainly an American invention. So then I got to thinking: okay, well, when was store-bought food coloring invented? My Googling expertise revealed that people have been coloring their food with various dyes for centuries. This route doesn't help us answer our question. Perhaps an examination of my own love of green beer will provide an answer?

So I began thinking about why I like green beer: it's an intoxicant, and that is fun. But it's also a pretty liquid. Hmm. Intoxicating pretty liquid. I then realized that my love of green beer is rooted in my intoxicating childhood experiences at amusement parks.

When I was a wee-tot, my most favorite rides in the world were the ones in which you got into a "boat" and then floated through various scenes animated by robots in this guiding moat. I was mesmerized by the water in the moat, it looked like candy water, as it was often vividly blue or green. Watching the first Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film as a youngster taught me that the water inside Wonka's factory was molten candy, and so I remember---I think I was six years old---scooping up a handful of water from a ride and trying to drink it. Just as we passed a robot monster that screamed "Don't go in the marsh! Stay out of the marsh!" my mother screamed "don't drink that Josh! You'll get sick!" and slapped my hands. I got bright green amusement ride water all over my t-shirt.

Now, my friends, we all know where green beer comes from. It's born of a deep, adolescent desire to drink pretty liquid that makes us sick! Someone inspired by an amusement park ride one day decided to color his or her beer, probably in the 1950s or some time like that, and the rest is history! Maybe it was Walt Disney? He invented a lot of things, you know, and had lots of secrets too. Nevertheless, Dr. Bachelor has solved the mystery of green beer. Now, he will provide you with his most complicated CDKitchen.com recipe ever. Oh, and by the way: I wrote this column after I had a few of these; they're tasty and make you the blarniest and most eloquentest as ever!

Serves/Makes: 1

• green food coloring
• 1 bottle Harp lager (or similar light-ish beer)