All beer lovers no doubt have at least one friend who does not share their passion for fermented grain beverages. There are many reasons for this. Some do not drink (and while I can’t condone this reckless behavior, people are certainly free to choose), while others drink, but claim they “don’t like” beer. This is the group can be a tough nut to crack, and it is they who are the subject of this article.
Saying that you don’t like beer is akin to saying that you don’t like any white food. There are simply so many types out there, there is without a doubt one that fits your taste. The “I don’t like beer” crowd can be roughly divided into two groups (I’ve met many members of both). There are the people who don’t like the bitterness of beer, and the people whose only contact with beer has been the beer flavored water cranked out by the likes of Coors and Budweiser. There is some overlap between the groups, and I’ll address the latter first, since it’s the easiest.
This first group is generally very easy to convert, because they are simply ignorant. Mind you, they don’t like being told they are ignorant — very few people respond well to that. They must be gently shown how good beer can be.
Most often, their only experience with beer has been watching it poured into tubing at a frat party. They need only to be steered in the right direction to appreciate a good brew.
Often they drink wine (or perhaps they prefer cocktails), and can appreciate a good complex alcoholic beverage. If you or a friend falls into this crowd, it pays to have a tasting with several excellent, complex beers that are varied in style. Belgian beers in particular are valuable for this, since they are renowned for their interesting tastes and complex flavor profiles. Start with a small enough number that you can focus on individual beers, but a large enough sample to give an idea of the variety of beers available. Four or five should do the trick. Here’s an example of what I would go for.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Mike Roberts
Nice article. I've tried a lot of different beers and never like any of them because of the bitterness. I know that it's mostly the hops that I don't like, but no one has ever pointed me toward anything that works. The Belgian beers are pretty good, but too fruity.
Most beers taste like old swamp water.
The Spatin Optimator sounds good.
2 - Gray Hunter
As far as Belgian beers, I always like Duvel. It is, in my homebrewer's opinion, a quintessential Belgian strong ale.
Sam Adams is also a good beer to break in new beer drinker's with.
Always remind people that while Blue Moon is a decent beer, it's still brewed by ... Coors. Ugh.
3 - Christopher Rose
Gray, Duvel is indeed one of the many great beers produced in Belgium but really ought to come with a warning; that stuff is lethal!
4 - zingzing
blue moon tastes like dirty bathwater. with orange!
anchor steam is good, but the aftertaste lingers a bit longer than i like.
you know, a lot of these beers linger just a bit too long... they go sour in your mouth.
of course, i'm american, so of course i have no taste in beer, right chris? bubbly water, that's what we make. gimme a pbr and shut up.
nah. i like a lot of beers, but as i grow older, i find myself drawn to lagers and pilsners over the stuff that's flavored-up too much. meh. wait. this list isn't for me at all. i'm a beer drinker...
5 - Christopher Rose
zing, I didn't say Americans had no taste, I said American beers are crap. But yeah, bubbly water is what the mainstream US beers exactly are!
6 - SFC SKI
Christopher, I am with you 100% on comment #5. I am about to leave Germany for the US, I'll probably stop drinking beer entirely.
Sidenote, I went to Budowiece in the Czech Republic, home of the original Budweiser. If Americans only knew the truth, they'd overthrow the "King of Beers" in a heartbeat.
7 - zingzing
dood. have you had some of your shitty english beers? shitty beer is shitty beer, and everyone knows how to make it.
while america does make some really good beers... and this is where i admit that european beers are better... i really don't care for microbrews or all that fruity crap that passes for higher-end beer here. i can drink one with dinner, but for some good old drinking...
oh! oh! a favorite of mine lately has been kronenburg or whatever! the french beer! F-R-E-N-C-H!
i know you hate the french. ha!
really, unless i'm just pissed off and want to drink myself to sleep, i usually just pick up a european lager or pils... because they are just better.
sigh. europe 1, america 0.
8 - zingzing
oop-that last one was for chris.
now for sfc ski... just so you know, we do get european beers here. so you can continue drinking. (we also get asian beers and mexican beers and all sorts of other beers. we don't drink australian beers. piss water, that.)
also, here's a little known secret: we get the exported beer, which is generally of better quality. when i was in europe (way back in the 1900s,) i thought grolsch was shit. of course, in england and mainland europe, it WAS shit. over here, however, it's a completely different beer. it's fantastic!
9 - SFC SKI
Your beer theory might have a corollary in the in "Pizza Hut pizza is merely acceptable in the US, but overseas it's damn good" principle.
I know there are good imports available in the US, but you have to live in the right places, and you pay a premium price.
10 - zingzing
nah, not really. a good european beer costs about as much as a good american beer. and if you're not living in a place where you can get a good beer... well, that's pretty much buttfuck, alabama... well, then, you don't deserve a good beer.
here in seattle, a crap beer generally runs around $3 for a pint (at a bar). microbrews and imports are about $5-6. in the store, you can get crap for $6 per 6-pack. the good stuff (be it american or european) runs you $8-10.
i used to live in the south, and there you just chop about a buck off any of those figures.
11 - SFC SKI
my last Stateside experience was out in BFE, this time around I'll be a little closer to what I call "civilization". Living in Europe has really spoiled me for choice when it comes to relaxation.
12 - zingzing
yeah, go to a city. i'm a little confused about your last sentence. in the right spots in america, you're pretty much overloaded with choice when it comes to various ways to relax. well, i guess i'm reading "spend my leisure time" there, and that might not be what you mean.
i don't see why anyone would want to live in the sticks or in some backwards town... i mean, i'm not going to move to europe only to find myself in chernobyl.
13 - Nick Jurkowski
Great to see comments from so many beer drinkers.
Though I have to say, the attitude towards American beers is slightly misplaced.
Yes, Coors, Miller, and Bud are crap. They're industrial beers that are brewed to historic American tastes, dating back to Prohibition when people just wanted fizzy water that would get you drunk. That being said, England produced Porter for a good part of the late 19th and early 20th century that was every bit as industrial and so bad that it drove people to stout. As zingzing said, you can find crap beer anywhere. However, The same definitely goes for good beer.
Unlike wine, there is nothing intrinsically location specific to making beer. As long as you have the know-how, anyone can make great beer. It's kind of a non sequitur to say you don't like American microbrews - a well made American Bohemian Pilsner (Reality Czeck Pilsner, for example) will taste just as good as an authentic Bohemian Pils. You can find good American microbrews in any style (for the record, I've never had an American Fruit beer that I've liked, either).
Anyway, International Beer Competition results have shown that American beers can compete quite well with their European counterparts. There are European beers I love (if God drinks beer, I'm pretty sure he drinks Duvel), but I really like to support local craft-breweries.
Of course, that's really easy in Seattle.
14 - STM
There are only two kinds of beer: Australian beer and cat's piss.
15 - STM
And as a sop to "beer" drinkers in other parts of the world, I'll put Foster's (the abomination produced by the otherwise splendid Carlton and United Brewery in Melbourne) in the cat's piss category. It's up there with Bud and Coors, although at least it's nearly 5 per cent alcohol, so after the first five beers you don't know it's crap.
As an Aussie, I do know about beer ... it's our national dish.
16 - sr
A fine beer is like a fine lady or a great steak. You always remember the taste.
17 - Nick Jurkowski
Ha, yes.
It turns out I was wrong. Anything that isn't Australian is cat's piss. And if that beer is Old Rasputin Imperial Stout, it comes out of a cat with rather dire urinary tract problems.
Sorry STM, just giving you some shit - I probably shouldn't comment after so many beers...
18 - STM
Zing: (we don't drink australian beers. piss water, that.)
One of these days, zing, if you ever meet up with a fair-dinkum aussie, saying stuff like that will make you a walk-up start candidate for an antipodean fist in the nostrils.
They hurt more than most, and it's why we don't need guns :)
As for the aussie beer you get in the US, it ain't aussie beer. It's got no fucking alcohol in in it for starters (local content starts around 5 per cent here), and since the whole raison d'etre of beer drinking is to get mightily and uproariously pissed (drunk), what's the point of drinking something that requires you to consume enough to fill Sydney Harbour before you even get light-headed?
And Nick, that bizarre-sounding beer you name? If it's from the great southern land, I've never heard of it and I've lived here all me life.
19 - GoingLikeSixty
sr: so you shove the bottle up her vajayjay first?
20 - zingzing
stm: "One of these days, zing, if you ever meet up with a fair-dinkum aussie, saying stuff like that will make you a walk-up start candidate for an antipodean fist in the nostrils."
i don't doubt it. but aussies are pussies anyway. bring it on, you wank. ahem, p-thub. really, we just get fosters around here. and it's 5% at least... you may be thinking of the midwest, where there is a 3.2% limit on what you can buy in the grocery store... but in most civilized portions of this great nation, we get the full alcohol content.
i just wanted to get you involved. i really don't know much about australian beer, so take my comment as a slap in the face, nothing more.
21 - Silver Surfer
Zing: Foster's is made for the export lager market. Most sales are in the US and Britain.
No one drinks it here, because it's crap.
It's a bit like France. Most of the good French wines are in France. They only export the shitty stuff (the lolly water and the cheap vinegar).
This place is awash in really, really good beer and I can pass judgment having travlled a fair bit over the years. As I say, it's our national dish. You'd hope we'd be good at it.
The thing is, the smaller Aussie brewers don't export much draught beer because it's too difficult, so you're only ever getting a bit of the pre-packaged stuff anyhow (some of which IS really good).
Just a tip zing: be careful being smart around Aussies, if you ever meet one. They tend to hit first and ask questions later, especially when it comes to discussions about beer and sport. Actually, that's probably all they'll talk about:)
22 - zingzing
"Just a tip zing: be careful being smart around Aussies, if you ever meet one."
oh, i've known several. and i do get smart around them. i enjoy a good confrontation. most i've known have been highly reasonable people. however, it is hard to respect someone with that ridiculous accent. :) then again, i suppose i'm the one with the accent, right?
23 - sr
Shame on you #19. Be respectful of the ladies and put a bar of soap in your mouth young man.
24 - STM
Zing: "then again, i suppose i'm the one with the accent, right?"
That's right Zing, we have a good snigger at Americans' accents here. The general concesnsus is that most sound like two cats being strangled at the same time. I have an American mate, and he cops a shit load every time he opens his mouth. We do love him though, the poor thing.
25 - Dr Dreadful
My wife discovered Blue Moon a few months ago and now she won't drink anything else. She can't rest unless she knows it's readily available. We were up at a tiny mountain town this week and she couldn't sleep until we'd ascertained for sure that the local store had it. It is pretty good for being brewed by Coors, although I actually prefer it without the obligatory orange slice.
My favorite, Newcastle Brown Ale, is readily available here, and it's imported, so tastes exactly the same as in the UK. So I'm happy.
It's not true that all American beers are piss weak - just the ones from the major brewers. (It's always amusing to watch big, macho, 250-pound frat guys down a couple of tiny cans of Bud Light and think they're bladdered.) You can get some quite nice ones from the so-called 'microbreweries': they are at least flavorful, although they do all tend to taste the same - as if they're trying too hard to please everybody.
Aussie beer (real Aussie beer) is pretty bloody good, especially the brews of a Mr J. Squire.
But Stan, you'd better have Blue Moon down there or I'll never get the missus to move...