We love to make a cocktail here at Esquire. A Rob Roy in wintertime? Great. A Last Word when we're feeling funky, and a Brain-Duster when we're feeling full-tilt weird? Absolutely. But from where I'm sitting today, on a Friday at home in social isolation, when the dust is collecting on the bottles at the bars that are all closed up, what really sounds good is a shot in one glass and a beer in another—a Boilermaker. In a perfect world, it'd be from the no-nonsense dive down the street. In the world we've got right now, I'll make do on my own. It's not like it's a hard drink to master.
There are two ways to do a Boilermaker. The first asks you to slam a shot of whiskey then drink a beer, while the second has you dunking your shot of whiskey into your beer, then chugging that. Both are efficient and neither is wrong (although for the sake of taste, you might want to keep them separate). Then, like nicotine in your blood or a bucket of cold water to the face, you're feeling more alive than you did however long it took you to down the beer ago. The alcohol is only a part of it. The physicality of a Boilermaker—that vigorous arm motion, the slamming of the glassware, that gasp for air afterwards—is what gets you flying.
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That's not to say that the Boilermaker, much like the Pickleback, hasn't been adopted by finer establishments and roped into elevated pairings of top shelf whiskey and craft microbrews, like wine and stinky cheese. These'll challenge your taste buds, and you'd absolutely be in the right to sip each slowly and alternately, instead of shooting them. Nor are bars limiting themselves to whiskey. The Boilermaker bar in New York, for example, pairs pilsner with mezcal, and raspberry sour ale with Campari. Take that as an invitation to use whatever-the-hell bottle in the kitchen for your own.
The Boilermaker started out as a nothing-fancy drink consumed by blue collar workers after a factory shift some 200 years ago. It remains, at its core, a drink best drunk shoulder-to-shoulder along the bar at a local joint. When heading down the block is out of the question, a Boilermaker is all the more necessary to remind us of those better nights amongst strangers and friends alike. And, we gotta admit, it complements the desperate mood of the hour. As far as whiskey-and-beer pairings go, here are a few recommendations, although there is quite literally no way to mess this one up. Repeat as necessary.
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