It’s not a question we have to ask very often. When you think of beer most people are going to think of lager (here in Australia that is what the vast majority of mainstream beer brands are) or something hoppy like a Pale Ale or an IPA. If you order a beer your guaranteed to get a beer…right?<br><br>But recently I had a beer that literally stopped me in my tracks to ponder if what I was drinking was actually a beer. The product was branded as a margarita sour and somewhere on the label it did say it was a beer but as I tasted it the question arose was this a beer or a cocktail?

The label provided more clues: it was a beer base with the addition of tequila, lacto, lime juice and Cointreau.  It certainly met the margarita brief in terms of flavour but it conjured the question of with all these additions when is a beer not a beer?

In Australia the definition of beer is governance by two organisations – the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and Food Standards Australia and New Zealand. For the purposes of this post as it contains more detail I’ll just review what the ATO has to say (on a side note the number of times the course of beer history has been changed due to taxes is astounding and could be a whole series of blog posts in itself!). The ATO provides a definition of what beer is in its ‘Excise Guidance for the Alcohol Industry’ and provides us with two key pieces of information regarding the beer in question. Firstly beer needs to contain hops or hop extracts or bitters that is not “less than four International Bitterness Units (IBU’s).” Now I don’t know the specific IBUs of this particular beer but the label states it contains hops. In terms of the added spirits which for this beer has Tequila and Cointreau, the ATO also accounts for this stating beer “may have other substances, including flavours, containing alcohol (other than beer spirit) added to it but only if that alcohol adds no more than 0.5% to the final total volume of alcohol”

So this amazing drink that I had:

Was it a Beer? On the basis of evidence more then likely yes!

Could it pass as a cocktail in terms of flavour? Yes!

Could it be a beer cocktail? Most definitely!

Simply an amazing drink? Absolutely!

ATO quotes: <a href=”https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/excise-on-alcohol/excise-on-beer#ato-Definitionofbeer”>https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/excise-on-alcohol/excise-on-beer#ato-Definitionofbeer</a&gt;

/http://href=”https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/excise-on-alcohol/excise-on-beer#ato-Definitionofbeer”>https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/excise-on-alcohol/excise-on-beer#ato-Definitionofbeer