Strange brews

I took in the Sunday supper at the new Pig & a Jelly Jar in central SLC. The imaginative down-home food was extraordinarily good ($20 a head for the gut-packing pork/chicken-based fare that ended with a doughnut dessert–Value! Value! Value!).

If you want a credible review go here.

Even more interesting are the cafe’s signature cocktails. Because the P&JJ has no license for hard liquor, the staff gets creative with beer and wine concoctions.

That may or may not be a good idea–particularly when the key ingredient is PBR. (Note to swanky cocktail freaks–stop reading now.)

Here’s the rogues gallery of cocktails:

PBR-tini: It sounds like a bar dare: PBR, olive juice, bleu cheese-stuffed olive, bacon strip, Cajun-salt rim. (The bacon strip is stuck vertically into the drink like a swizzle stick from hell.)

OK, if that didn’t make you blow your cookies, the rest are easy.

PBR-Mary: house Bloody Mary mix, celery, lime, olive.

PBR-Sunrise: fresh-squeezed OJ and grenadine. Believe it not, this one works. I sampled it. Beer and citrus are a natural  (like lime in your Tecate) and our server Josh recommended chucking the PBR and going with Golden Spike hefeweizen instead — which likely made all the difference.

My partner in crime, Dan Nailen, and I plan to examine these infernal brews more closely and report back.

Pig and a Jelly Jar, corner of 400 East and 900 South.