Are You Ready for Raw Fish On Your Beer?

There was a point in the not too distant past when the Bloody Mary jumped the shark. You know what I’m talking about; The vodka and tomato juice combo, which is a wonderful cocktail all on its own, was garnished with garish nibbles. You could walk into just about any bar in America and order a Bloody Mary and it would come with an all you can eat buffet skewered to the edge of the glass. Grilled shrimp, hamburgers, jalapeno poppers, a Caesar salad…if you could dream it up and put it on a stick, the bartender would put it in your Bloody Mary.

It’s hard to say what the most ridiculous Bloody Mary garnish is—the steak and tater tots from a bar in Atlanta, the bag of popcorn/nachos/burgers and pickled vegetables attached to a Bloody Mary at a pub in Wisconsin…putting food on top of your tomato juice-based cocktail got pretty crazy. I think the over-garnishing trend has subsided, but it seems that maybe beer is getting in on the food garnish treatment.

I’ve been known to stick a wedge of lime on the edge of a crappy lager every now and then, just for an extra kick of citrus, but at San Diego-based Puesto, you can order a beer with garnish of ceviche on top of the can. For realsies. Bartender Lucien Conner has a thing where he hollows out a bell pepper, fills it with ceviche, slices off the bottom of that pepper and then sticks the ceviche/pepper on top of a can of an open Modelo so the citrusy/spicy flavors of the ceviche soak into the beer. And you drink it all through a straw.