by gillmang » Wed Aug 01, 2007 5:01 pm
It's an interesting discussion, I started to consume beer a few years before I found my first book on it (i.e., when I first read how it was made and what it was "supposed" to taste like).
At first, I didn't like beer. The taste struck me as bizarre, I couldn't "place" it. Up until then, the oddest thing I drank was Quebec spruce beer (a pop flavored with spruce extract) and beverage beer struck me as similarly oddly flavored.
However, within a couple of years of starting to drink beer, I learned to like it. I could see that beers differed in taste (I didn't know why), and I acquired a taste for the golden ales popular in Canada then like Molson Export, Labatt 50 and Dow Ale (lightly fruity, mildly hopped with a nice cereal taste).
When I bought my first book on beer (this in the mid-70's, I believe it was called a Book of Beer by John Porter who was a professor at a New England college) everything became clear. I learned what was in beer and most important, that the taste was a combination of cereal flavors from the malted grains, flowery and sometimes bitter flavors from the hops (a plant whose flowers contain a resinous extract), and differing flavors from yeasts, depending on their type.
Once I read this, I found it easier to understand what I was drinking. It would have been interesting had I read that book before I began. I don't know if I would have liked beer sooner, I am not sure (you can know what something tastes like and still not like it, e.g., I don't really like green tea even though I know how the tea is processed - I prefer the cured type like Orange Pekoe).
Still, overall I feel that first book and the many that followed helped me to appreciate the different kinds of beer. It is true that many people don't like commercial beer but like micro-brewed beers. Some however will never come to terms with craft beers because these just have more of what they don't like in commercial beers. I guess it is different for everyone.
It is hard now to analyse it after being accustomed to the taste and knowing so much (if I may say) about the different beers and how they are made.
There are some beers I don't like. I don't like commercial beers that are too bland from insufficient malt and hops. (Sometimes too they have a corny, "adjunct" taste I find off-putting). At the other end of the scale, although I can appreciate the craft in it, I do not like most micro ales that have a very strong taste of West Coast-grown C hops (Cascades, Centennial and similar tasting beers) - yet as always there are exceptions, I like Sierra Nevada's beers a lot, for example. But I like most everything else in the beer world, provided the beer is served in good condition for its type which generally means, as fresh as possible and not light struck.
Gary