Beer in Provence

The French - or at least the southern French - surprise me sometimes though every time, it really shouldn't. These are the people from the sophisticated-yet-simple land of wine. Want to get crazy? Ooh, bubbly wine! Add a splash of crême de cassis and call it a Kir! Madness!

Because once something isn't under the revered mantle of AOC or AOP, they're not afraid to play with flavour combinations or to bring influences of their childhood into adult life.

Enter: beer.

Now, the fact that I don't like beer probably has a lot to do with why I'm only discovering this now. Alongside the grocery store aisle laden with mostly lagers and the odd pack of Guinness, there are beers flavoured with raspberry, cherry, tequila, or wormwood. And there's a thing called Panaché which I finally found out is half beer, half lemonade.

Ok, cool.

Now, have I mentioned the French love of the "sirop"?  No drink crystals here. Ask for Kool-Aid and get a blank stare. But sirop - quite literally flavoured sugar syrup, with some real fruit for the fancy brands -  aah. Sirop will have almost an entire aisle devoted to it with flavours like strawberry, grenadine, lemon, grapefruit, grape, cola, mint, orgeat (bitter almond), aniseed, violet, and so on! The idea is you put a splash of it in water or fizzy water to make a flavoured drink for kiddies. Very common on kids menus at restaurants "includes a main course, a soda or sirop, and a scoop of ice cream" or for drizzling on top of shaved ice for a granita (what I would call a snow cone.)

A couple shelves of the sirops on offer at the small-but-awesome Monoprix in town.
They allowed me to take photos on condition I didn't show prices, hence the award winning editing here.

Now we've got sirop covered.

Tonight, I asked about something on the menu and discovered beer-meets-sirop. In this case grenadine (though lemon and strawberry were also popular, I'm told) was mixed with whatever was on tap and I'm not quite sure what happened or if it was right, but...

I liked it.

Picture a grown-up Shirley Temple in beer form with a bubble gum pink tinted head of foam from the garishly red grenadine. No orange wedge or maraschino cherry, sadly, but mind-bending and oddly satisfying.

I wonder what other beer-based surprises lay in wait.