A vast quantity of beers greatly exceeding 99

[Mauve Shirt]

It started, as it usually does, with Mike's Hard and similar. Ah, youth.
Then came the fruity beers, shandies and so on.
Then I transitioned to proper lagers, stouts, wheat beers and other non-sweet varieties.
Then, and this was the true beginning, came amber and gold ales. This taste then progressed into stronger and stronger ales until I reached IPA-level appreciation.
Turn around a year or two later, and while I wouldn't say I'm a beer snob, I am a beer person.
I'm probably a beer snob.
Hey other beer people! What are you drinking lately? What style/nationality/season do you like best? What is your favorite brewery, micro or otherwise? What beer always populates your fridge?
I know we have brewers on this forum of ours, and I have tasted some of your concoctions and found them to be good! Have you performed any mad science recently?



I received an assortment of German beers for my birthday a few weeks ago, and am right now enjoying a Maximator by Augustiner-Brau Wagner. It is quite German indeed, a pleasant Doppelbock of 7.5% ABV.

[Telonius]

I started drinking beers when I was in Germany for a six-week study abroad during high school. This set the bar pretty high.

Koelsch is probably my favorite style, but it's relatively hard to find a good one around here, even at places that stock a lot of craft beers and imports. Otherwise, I loves me some dark beers. Stouts, Imperial or otherwise; dark ales; dark brews of any variety. Old Dominion puts out a nice one called Morning Glory. Devil's Backbone is (or has been, at least) pretty hard to find, but they make some amazing stuff. Legend Brown Ale is another favorite of mine.

EDIT: Another completely amazing beer is Omission Lager. It's a pretty average lager, but the amazing part is that my wife and I can both drink it. She's celiac, so most beers are off limits to her. But they do some sort of witchcraft/mad science to remove the gluten. It's a hundred times better than the sorghum-based gluten-free beers. (Red Bridge is nice and all, but it's not really the same thing as a real beer).

[Flickerdart]

I couldn't stand beer for a long time - the bitterness of hops is literally the worst thing that exists, and since IPAs are the most popular style next to yellow water, I thought all beer tasted like that. Then came my discovery that Belgian monks brewed delicious beers that didn't taste like a piny brick, and then I expanded from there into all kinds of stouts and bocks.

My latest favourite is Avery Mephistopheles Stout - a heady 16% ABV that is served in a tiny shot-glass-sized beer stein. It is the most adorable thing, and while you can definitely taste the alcohol, it's still very much a beer, and a damn good one at that.

[Aedilred]

I'm a fan of hoppy beers, so pale ales, bitters, some ruby ales, and so on. I don't drink a lot of lager except when there's nothing else available or when I'm at home and can't get to a proper shop so have to rely on what's available at the cornershop. Or with curry. Among relatively commercial lagers, Cobra, Budvar and (where those are unavailable) San Miguel tend to be my go-tos.

On the other hand I also don't tend to get out to pubs as much as I used to and when I do I usually either try some guest ale I've never seen before and probably never will again or stick to some old favourite that's fairly widely available. In the latter category, favourites include Tribute and Doom Bar; Greene King IPA; Adnam's Explorer (not actually that widely available, unlike its decent but inferior cousin, Broadside) and a handful of Badger Ales (Fursty Ferret, Golden Champion and whatever their old Gold beer is now called: First Call I think?).

Slightly more obscurely, there's a brewery called very close to my parents' house which is bigger than "microbrewery" and increasingly widely available but still fairly small, and makes some truly excellent beers: Bath Ales. Their Gem, Spa and Wild Hare are particular favourites, and the lager they sell is pretty good too, although it's originally Dutch I think.

One of the best beers I can recall having was (I think) Devil's Water (could have been Devil's Elbow; by the end of the evening I was very drunk) from Hexhamshire Brewery which I tried at a beer festival. Unfortunately Hexhamshire only supply a handful of fairly local pubs - local to Hexhamshire, that is - and don't even regularly attend bigger beer festivals so my chances of finding it again are slim.

[Starwulf]

It started, as it usually does, with Mike's Hard and similar. Ah, youth.
Then came the fruity beers, shandies and so on.


Sadly, even at the ripe old age of 33 I still can only enjoy these kinds, anything else just tastes like piss to me. Best friend is a beer person, guy's probably tasted over a thousand different beers(or more!) at this point(literally, no exaggeration) and he's always having me try whatever beer he's drinking at the time, and besides a few Harvest type beers(pumpkin or apple flavoring), I honestly can't stand any of them, all so harsh and bitter. He says "It's an acquired taste", but I'll be damned if I want to suffer through the process of acquiring it.

[tomandtish]

I tend to prefer porters and stouts. I am not a fan of IPAs, which puts me at a disadvantage living in Texas (any place that has a decent tap selection will have a large number of their taps pulling IPAs).

Started tracking my beer drinking a year ago on the Untappd ap. I've had 182 different beers in the last year. Atwater Brewery's Decadent Dark Chocolate Ale was a good one. Shiner birthday beer was an interesting one. They described it as a milk stout, but it really was more like a chocolate flavored Shiner Bock. Tasted great, but the body was wrong for a stout.

That's often my biggest complaint in beers: those that aren't what they claim to be.

[Telonius]

Sadly, even at the ripe old age of 33 I still can only enjoy these kinds, anything else just tastes like piss to me. Best friend is a beer person, guy's probably tasted over a thousand different beers(or more!) at this point(literally, no exaggeration) and he's always having me try whatever beer he's drinking at the time, and besides a few Harvest type beers(pumpkin or apple flavoring), I honestly can't stand any of them, all so harsh and bitter. He says "It's an acquired taste", but I'll be damned if I want to suffer through the process of acquiring it.

Yeah, there are some beer people who really go for the bitter stuff. I can appreciate a good IPA, too, but there is definitely a trend among beer people to go for the super-extra-hoppy stuff. That can be a big turn-off for a more casual drinker. I'd ask him if he has something with a much more malty taste. Dark beers (my favorites), blonde ales, or even some particular APAs can do that for you.

[Scarlet Knight]

Ah, I still love an ice cold Corona and lime on a hot summer's day...

[Mauve Shirt]

My dad calls most microbrew ales "over-hopped under-fermented bull****." :smalltongue: Super hoppy stuff still isn't my favorite, but I like a pale ale once in a while. Some IPAs are even sweet if you take your time with them; Dogfish Head IPAs are a milder entry point as far as taste is concerned, but you wouldn't want to drive after one.
I'm on untappd as Mauve, if anyone wants to observe my drinking habits. :smallbiggrin:

[Winter_Wolf]

Sadly, even at the ripe old age of 33 I still can only enjoy these kinds, anything else just tastes like piss to me. Best friend is a beer person, guy's probably tasted over a thousand different beers(or more!) at this point(literally, no exaggeration) and he's always having me try whatever beer he's drinking at the time, and besides a few Harvest type beers(pumpkin or apple flavoring), I honestly can't stand any of them, all so harsh and bitter. He says "It's an acquired taste", but I'll be damned if I want to suffer through the process of acquiring it.

As a former beer drinker, I think it's safe to say that if you were ever going to acquire the taste for it, it would have been a fairly short process. Like vodka or whiskey. You either take to it or you don't. 'Course if you've only ever been handed swill then it's probably not a fair measure. I detest Budweiser anything and it was all you'd ever get where I grew up, so in that case I'd never acquire a taste for it. On the other hand you seem to have been exposed to enough variety that you're not in that camp. Just console yourself with the knowledge of all the money you're saving by not drinking it.

[Knaight]

Sadly, even at the ripe old age of 33 I still can only enjoy these kinds, anything else just tastes like piss to me. Best friend is a beer person, guy's probably tasted over a thousand different beers(or more!) at this point(literally, no exaggeration) and he's always having me try whatever beer he's drinking at the time, and besides a few Harvest type beers(pumpkin or apple flavoring), I honestly can't stand any of them, all so harsh and bitter. He says "It's an acquired taste", but I'll be damned if I want to suffer through the process of acquiring it.

This sounds like you probably don't particularly like the taste of hops. Beer is an acquired taste to some extent, but that's not going to get around not liking one of the primary flavors, particularly when it's one that tends to be emphasized substantially more in microbreweries - with the notable exception of beers with fruit flavors.

I'm similar in that regard - "hoppy" is a warning label as far as I'm concerned, not a sign of quality.

[Flickerdart]

Sadly, even at the ripe old age of 33 I still can only enjoy these kinds, anything else just tastes like piss to me. Best friend is a beer person, guy's probably tasted over a thousand different beers(or more!) at this point(literally, no exaggeration) and he's always having me try whatever beer he's drinking at the time, and besides a few Harvest type beers(pumpkin or apple flavoring), I honestly can't stand any of them, all so harsh and bitter. He says "It's an acquired taste", but I'll be damned if I want to suffer through the process of acquiring it.
It's entirely possible that your friend's tastes just don't match up with yours. Have you ever had Delirium Tremens? It's probably the easiest to find of the Belgian-style beers that are actually good. No bitterness at all, very robust and smooth (but not creamy in the Guinness sense).

[Starwulf]

It's entirely possible that your friend's tastes just don't match up with yours. Have you ever had Delirium Tremens? It's probably the easiest to find of the Belgian-style beers that are actually good. No bitterness at all, very robust and smooth (but not creamy in the Guinness sense).

I'll have to see if I can find it, I've always felt that if I could find a beer that tasted smooth and not sharp I'd probably enjoy drinking it, I've just never been able to find one that does so. Even the harvest-style beers my buddy gets sometimes, while having an alright taste, just have this....jarring bit to them that makes me go "yeah, not something I could drink lots of".

Oddly enough I always thought it was the microbreweries that would be the place where I'd actually FIND a beer that I could try enjoy, it saddens me to read here on the thread that that is actually just not that likely since it's apparently the hops I dislike.

My friends tastes run heavy on IPA's, I know that much from the terminology that he's thrown around. He's been experimenting with India style beers lately, something about them being much more heavy or something, I don't know, I don't fully understand what he's talking about half the time when he goes into full-on beer connoisseur mode. He drug me to a beer and bacon fest a while back, but sadly the fest wasn't that great and neither was the beer(we went on the first day, and it was it's first year. Apparently the second day went like 10x better, more beer vendors, more/better bacon, but first day sucked so bad we left after 2 hours).

Edit: Two things I thought of one, first one: I'd like to find a beer that goes down as smoothly as cream soda. LOL. I'm not even sure if that's possible, but I've always imagined being able to drink a beer that has this beautiful froth at the top, a nice color and that goes down smoothly, no burning, no harsh/bitterness to it.

Second thing: I like this thread. I've attempted to participate in beer discussions before on other forums, and even once before on this one a few years ago I believe, but most people don't want to bother helping a person figure out what kind of beer they might like, and they tend to get kinda snippy/snooty when you come in and go "Oh, I don't drink much beer because I can't find one I like". So, thanks for not driving me out of the thread :) I've already resolved to find this Delirium Tremens the next time I'm in a place that has a decent-sized liquor store.

[Flickerdart]

Oddly enough I always thought it was the microbreweries that would be the place where I'd actually FIND a beer that I could try enjoy, it saddens me to read here on the thread that that is actually just not that likely since it's apparently the hops I dislike.

My friends tastes run heavy on IPA's, I know that much from the terminology that he's thrown around. He's been experimenting with India style beers lately, something about them being much more heavy or something, I don't know, I don't fully understand what he's talking about half the time when he goes into full-on beer connoisseur mode.
IPA stands for India Pale Ale. These (historically) were beers that were extra-hopped so that they'd make the journey from Great Britain to India without spoiling. You probably want to avoid anything calling itself India or Pale Ale (and any adjectives like Double or Triple are bad news, unless it's actually Dubbel or Tripel which are styles of Belgian beers and very different from IPAs).


Edit: Two things I thought of one, first one: I'd like to find a beer that goes down as smoothly as cream soda. LOL. I'm not even sure if that's possible, but I've always imagined being able to drink a beer that has this beautiful froth at the top, a nice color and that goes down smoothly, no burning, no harsh/bitterness to it.
See if you can get your hands on some German beers. Anything by Hofbrauhaus or Weihenstephan is more likely than not to be exactly what you're after, most likely the lagers or the bocks. This sort of beer is what's called "session" beer - because of the low alcohol content and smooth taste, you can sit down and just drink a lot of it (a "session") without getting drunk off your rocker. These are typically what you see being drunk out of those massive glass pints with the handle.

Related:
http://i.imgur.com/3iTsntW.jpg

[Mauve Shirt]

Another option for beer that doesn't taste beery is a fruity lambic. Leffe Ruby is a good one. Lambics in general tend towards the sour side, but they are lightly hopped compared to many beers you'll find here.

Really for minimal hops, hang out in Belgium and Germany.

[Flickerdart]

Another option for beer that doesn't taste beery is a fruity lambic. Leffe Ruby is a good one. Lambics in general tend towards the sour side, but they are lightly hopped compared to many beers you'll find here.

Really for minimal hops, hang out in Belgium and Germany.
Similar to lambics are Wild/Flemish ales but I would even hesitate to call them beer at this point.

[Telonius]

Second thing: I like this thread. I've attempted to participate in beer discussions before on other forums, and even once before on this one a few years ago I believe, but most people don't want to bother helping a person figure out what kind of beer they might like, and they tend to get kinda snippy/snooty when you come in and go "Oh, I don't drink much beer because I can't find one I like". So, thanks for not driving me out of the thread :) I've already resolved to find this Delirium Tremens the next time I'm in a place that has a decent-sized liquor store.

Not sure how Western your Maryland is, but in northern Virginia you can find it at just about any Wegman's and half the other grocery stores as well.

[Mauve Shirt]

"La dee da I'm from Virginia and we have beer in the grocery stores wuh" That's you. :smalltongue:
Here in central MD we've got DT in decent-sized liquor stores, but the closer neighborhood booze dispensaries usually have only fridge standards like Yuengling or something Heavy Seas.

[Telonius]

"La dee da I'm from Virginia and we have beer in the grocery stores wuh" That's you. :smalltongue:
Here in central MD we've got DT in decent-sized liquor stores, but the closer neighborhood booze dispensaries usually have only fridge standards like Yuengling or something Heavy Seas.

:smallbiggrin: Yeah, I'm a Pennsylvania transplant myself. The fact that you can buy a six-pack from someplace other than a bar is still amazing to me. Always thought those drive-through beer distributors back home should have been in a Gary Larson "Trouble brewing..." cartoon.

[the_druid_droid]

"La dee da I'm from Virginia and we have beer in the grocery stores wuh" That's you. :smalltongue:
Here in central MD we've got DT in decent-sized liquor stores, but the closer neighborhood booze dispensaries usually have only fridge standards like Yuengling or something Heavy Seas.


:smallbiggrin: Yeah, I'm a Pennsylvania transplant myself. The fact that you can buy a six-pack from someplace other than a bar is still amazing to me. Always thought those drive-through beer distributors back home should have been in a Gary Larson "Trouble brewing..." cartoon.

You folks need to come to Illinois if you really want your minds blown. Any fermented drink you like can be found in the grocery stores - beer, liquor or wine. And any grocery store is at least as well-stocked as what passes for an ABC store where I grew up down south. The actual liquor stores are, well... kind of like Amazon for alcohol.

With that out of the way, my own tastes usually run to darker beers, typically porters and stouts. I don't have much of a fierce brand loyalty, so I enjoy trying new ones in search of pleasant surprises. I'm also fond of Belgians (because who isn't?) and I do love a good Hefeweitzen to change things up from the chocolate-and-coffee bunch now and then.

[Crow]

No beer, just brennivín for me.

[Mystic Muse]

I tend to prefer Hard apple ciders myself. Does anyone have any good brands to recommend along those lines?

Also, there's a blonde ale called "Harlot" at my local store that I'm wondering how it tastes. Yes, I'm primarily interested for the pervy name, so sue me. :smalltongue:

[Flickerdart]

I tend to prefer Hard apple ciders myself. Does anyone have any good brands to recommend along those lines?
There was a glorious cider house I frequented in Pittsburgh called Arsenal, and I haven't yet found a commercial cider that compares to what they made. However, I'm quite fond of Doc's Draft hopped cider.

As for the Harlot, review sites are your friend (http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/28994/81508/) though it seems this one isn't very common.

[tyckspoon]

Edit: Two things I thought of one, first one: I'd like to find a beer that goes down as smoothly as cream soda. LOL. I'm not even sure if that's possible, but I've always imagined being able to drink a beer that has this beautiful froth at the top, a nice color and that goes down smoothly, no burning, no harsh/bitterness to it.


There's actually a style called a cream ale which might suit you if you want to keep trying lighter-colored beer :) I'm personally fond of scotch ales, which are on the dark & malty end of the spectrum (usually associated with caramel/coffee/chocolatey flavor tones.) If the bottle/package happens to have the label, you want to look for things with a low IBU number, which is a measure of bitterness - there'll be some in any beer because alcohol, which you can't really hide unless you go into fruit flavors, but low IBU values will generally minimize the hops flavors.

[Flickerdart]

There's actually a style called a cream ale which might suit you if you want to keep trying lighter-colored beer :) I'm personally fond of scotch ales, which are on the dark & malty end of the spectrum (usually associated with caramel/coffee/chocolatey flavor tones.)
I considered recommending those, but cream ales are way too oily for my own liking and scotch ales taste like pure molasses (which should mean that they age well, I guess).

[tomandtish]

I tend to prefer Hard apple ciders myself. Does anyone have any good brands to recommend along those lines?

Also, there's a blonde ale called "Harlot" at my local store that I'm wondering how it tastes. Yes, I'm primarily interested for the pervy name, so sue me. :smalltongue:

I'd try Crispen's Blackberry Pear cider. It is wonderful! Picked up a case for Christmas.

Edit on 3/12 since I'm last post: I picked up a bottle of Guinness "The 1759" at Costco. I'm holding it till May when a friend comes in to town. $25.99 for 25 ounces.... I suspect it can't live up to that price tag.