Beer Cocktails? Cheers!

The week of St. Patrick’s Day is always big on the drinking front, and perhaps you’re ready for something other than plain old beer. Esquire suggests some beer-based cocktails:

• Porteree: Take a quarter-pint of porter, add superfine sugar, then fill with ice before topping off with more porter. A little grated nutmeg, and you’re golden.
• Black Velvet: “The most elegant and delicious of beer drinks,” David Wondrich raves about this concoction—a champagne flute filled with half stout, half brut bubbly.

• Shandy Gaff: Pour half a pint of a good, well-chilled American pale ale, and top with ginger beer.
• Berliner Weisse mit Schuss: Pour an ounce of raspberry syrup into a wheat-beer glass, top with said brew.
• Groundskeeper: Start with 1 ounce of a smoky single-malt Scotch, then fill the rest of a pint glass with chilled American pilsner. Yes, even Bud.

(More beer stories.)