Essen | A taste magazine

La Clara is a slightly alcoholic drink that mixes beer with lemonade and ginger, or ginger ale or cider. The proportion is usually 50 and 50. Called Clara in Spain (for Clear Lemonade), Shandy in England and Radler in Italy, this strange mix of slightly alcoholic with nonalcoholic drinks has a version in more or less every country, not only for the name but also for proportions and ingredients, always similar anyway.

Italian Radler however owes its creation to Franz Xavier Kluger, a German chef who in september 1922 served to thirteen thousand cyclists stopping at his tavern an alcoholic but watered down drink, lavishing the health of the athletes and saving his stock of beer.