The wife got me a subscription to Mantry for Christmas. If you are too lazy to click that link, Mantry can be best summed up as a food snob of the month club geared towards men. In addition to receiving a pound of bacon, gourmet fried pork skins, bacon toffee chocolate, and a few other things, I also received a bottle of Bloody Mary concentrate. The thing is, I’m not really a fan of Bloody Marys. I don’t like tomato juice, and I don’t get the point of vodka (seriously, what’s the point? It doesn’t taste like anything!). So, I went ahead and did the only thing that I know how to do: I mixed it in beer.

Now, I have had a beer Bloody Mary only once before. Armando mixed one up with some IPA and used Ballast Point’s Bloody Mary mix. Despite the tomato juice, I thought it wasn’t too bad. Beer definitely has a bit more to offer flavor-wise than vodka, and it helped masked the tomato juice.

Now, if you noticed above, this bottle I have is Bloody Mary concentrate, not mix. This means that there is no tomato juice, just pickle juice, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and some salt and pepper. Appetizing, right?

My beer of choice was Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils, an incredible beer. A lot of hop flavor, but still balanced with a pilsner malt backbone. It’s dry, crisp, and very refreshing. The Bloody Mary recipe on the concentrate bottle is simply “1 part concentrate with 3 parts tomato juice + vodka.” I opted for two ounces mixed with the entire twelve ounce bottle of beer, and no tomato juice.

Despite my disapproval for tomato juice, I think that this would have benefited from having some added. The problem, as you could probably tell from the photo, is that all the seasoning fell to the bottom, resulting in a need to constantly swirl the glass around to try and mix it back in. I think having some tomato juice would have helped keep it in solution.

Anyways, despite the weird texture, this was kinda tasty. Very spicy and peppery, although a tad too salty. The spiciness was what was great about this, it played very well with the hop character in the beer. Some of the carbonation was killed in the process of adding the concentrate, which made for a little bit of an odd texture. Being a beer fan, I of course would much rather that this concoction be a bit more bubbly.

I’m gonna give this another go, but with a touch of tomato juice. I still want the focus to be on the beer, so I only want enough tomato juice to balance out the saltiness, but not so much to cover up too much of the beer flavor.