First chelada & michelada
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Who’s heard of a city called San Luis Potosí?
Located in central Mexico, it’s a high-altitude ex-mining town that has a curious claim to fame. It’s where the michelada was said to have been invented.
If you’re not familiar with a michelada, you’ve been missing out. It’s a build on the chelada, a drink that’s something of a cultural flavour phenomenon in Mexico, and a big deal in the USA too.
A chelada is a refreshing beer cocktail served with ice and spiced with salt and lime. Think margarita but with light beer. As you can imagine, they are deliciously cooling in the searing summer heat of Mexico and are served in most bars and street stalls. The actual name ‘chelada’ is said to be a portmanteau of ‘chela’ (Mexican slang for beer) and ‘helado’ (cold, as in “I’ll have a cold one”), which seems highly plausible. The other etymological theory, although a bit more dubious, is that the word is a corruption of ‘chabela’, a style of heavy-duty glassware that a beer cocktail is often served in (picture an old-school prawn cocktail glass).
As for a michelada… it’s like a chelada on steroids, pimped up and packed with extra ingredients. Salt and lime juice for sure, but then a regional variation of chilli powder, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, tomato juice (sometime Clamato juice, which is tomato juice, spices & dried clam broth), black pepper and Maggi Seasoning (like a fermented dark soy sauce). You can probably see why it’s often referred to as a Mexican Bloody Mary.
So while the chelada is cold, refreshing and citrusy, the michelada is cold, refreshing and savoury. Both are ‘cervezas preparada’ or prepared beers, which is just the family name for all these types of beer cocktail – and there are many variations, as we shall see.
But what’s all that got to do with San Luis Potosí?
If we head back to the early 1970s, there’s a popular and oft repeated origin story that centres around a man named Michel Ésper Jorge from San Luis Potosí. A civil engineer by trade, he apparently turned up to his tennis club one day – Club Deportivo Potosino – with a hangover. Hey, it happens. But who does he go to for a cure? The bartender of course. The bartender hands him a glass with beer, ice, salt and lime juice – essentially a chelada – to perk him up. But Michel decides to add a selection of spicier ingredients to the mix for the extra kick he needs. It starts being referred to as the michelada, after his first name, and other tennis club members start ordering it in their droves – the perfect pick-me-up after a hard-fought tennis match in the heat.
Soon, its popularity spreads across the central and northern Mexican states – and eventually into Texas, when a San Luis Potosí native opened a torta restaurant (selling Mexican sandwiches) in Austin with a michelada on the menu. From the 1990s onwards, micheladas started appearing everywhere, from convenience stores to high-end cantinas, and a whole drinking category is born.
As for the first chelada, the dates are a bit murkier, but it seems it was enjoyed sometime earlier, in the 1940s-50s. While we don’t have an official written ‘recipe’ or proud bartender behind the invention, it appears to have emerged gradually rather than at one single eureka moment – an established cultural tradition rather than innovation.
But the decade makes sense if you look at the wider context of Mexico in the 1940s – especially if you follow each of the chelada’s ingredients in turn. Let’s start with ice. Like most hot countries, Mexico’s general adoption of refrigeration, and ice in particular, came surprisingly late (you can read about the topic here). In the late 19th century and early 20th century, ice was only available to wealthy Mexican elites, who had the money and wherewithal to source and store it. From the 1930s, industrial refrigeration started to expand into cities, now available to restaurants and larger institutions. It was only in the 40s that ice became more accessible to the wider population. This of course coincided with cold beer becoming standardised – so it was only a matter of time before the two were put together.
The 1940s also saw local breweries like Corona, Modelo and Tecate start aggressively expanding, ensuring their bottled and canned beers were now available all over Mexico. And this takes us to the next few ingredients in a chelada – salt and lime. The beer bottles used to be sealed with metal caps, which would almost always leave a ring of rust on the rim – which Mexican beer lovers started wiping away with a lime wedge. Sure, it added a tasty tang, but it also had the bonus of naturally disinfecting the glass and acting as an insect repellent too. The trend caught on – and now Mexican beer is forever associated with limes. Salt, too, was often added to the rim of cans and bottles. As a natural flavour enhancer, it reduced the bitterness of the beer and was often used to make lighter, cheaper beers taste better. This use of lime and salt was simply part of the ‘cantina culture’ in Mexico, a practice that was so common it led to the commercialisation of ‘beer salts’ (citrus salt) specifically for this purpose!
Today, if you go to Mexico, and head to any street with food stalls, you’re guaranteed to find at least one selling a version of a chelada or michelada. And flavour-wise, there are usually lots to options to choose from, from subtle sauce variations to ‘dressings’ that are more supper than sipping.
An ojo rojo michelada is made with tomato juice and chili sauce and is sometimes called a bloody beer.
A cubana michelada is made with Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, Tabasco, black pepper and Maggi Seasoning.
A clamato michelada is crafted with clam and tomato juice and hot sauces.
A gomichela michelada is a bonkers sweeter version, made using tamarind or chamoy sauce (like a sweet & sticky fruit salsa) on the rim and often garnished with gummy sweets instead of salt.
A michelada botanera is basically a seafood platter in a drink, and includes large amounts of shrimp, scallops or ceviche on top of the beer.
A michelagua is a non-alcoholic version, without lager but with a fruity agua fresca instead, usually mango or pineapple.
To give a sense of its popularity, the chelada is now the No.1 Mexican flavour in the USA, contributing to 97% of the growth in flavoured Mexican imports.
They can be bought as RTDs (ready-to-drink, basically just in a can), with the Modelo Chelada alone surpassing 20 million case sales in 2023! All major US breweries (Molson Coors, Budweiser, Constellation Brands, Lagunitas etc) now have a chelado offering, which range in flavours, from Mango & Chilli to Spicy Watermelon. Chelados are BIG.
In the end, whether you trace the drink’s roots back to a hungover tennis player in San Luis Potosí or a regular at a nameless cantina, the beauty of the chelada – and its wilder sibling, the michelada – is that neither really belongs to anyone. They’re the product of habit, heat, ingenuity and a bit of improvisation; drinks shaped as much by climate and culture as by taste. Ice becomes available, beer gets colder. Beer caps rust, limes get squeezed. Beer tastes ‘off’, salt gets added. And somewhere along the way, a ritual is born. The michelada may have a better story, even a protagonist, but the chelada is something more elusive: a slow cultural evolution in a glass. And perhaps that’s the real magic of it all – these aren’t just drinks you order, they’re traditions you inherit, tweak, and pass on, one refreshing sip at a time.
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