Beer Blogging: The Gateway Drug
This is my confession: I did not emerge from the womb a fully-formed beer snob. I will admit to sneaking off to the bathroom during high school parties to pour out half-empty Budweisers (adolescence was a dark time for us all). For the first year or so of college, I was still grinning and bearing it. Most of us, I suspect, were in the same boat.
But then I started enjoying beer. Part of it was brute acclimation – if you drink anything long enough, you’ll develop a taste for it (nothing else explains PBR’s market share). More importantly, my beer-drinking horizons were expanding. Friends turned 21 and started venturing into Total Wine, the ubiquitous East Coast booze emporium. Suddenly, Miller High Life wasn’t the classiest thing you could drink on a Thursday afternoon.
But it wasn’t Chimay or Delirium Tremens that turned me on to micro brews. Instead, the “classy” beer for college kids was Sam Adams Cherry Wheat, a treacly confection that’s approximately eight parts sugary additives and one part hops. At the time, I swear it tasted like sweet nectar. I think we were all secretly relieved that beer drinking didn’t have to be such a chore.
After Cherry Wheat, the idea of social drinking suddenly made sense. If you’re 18 and Coors Light is the best you’ve ever known, the idea of enjoying a beer on your porch or sharing a six-pack with a few friends must seem utterly inconceivable. If you’re not drinking to get drunk, why subject your taste buds to such abuse? But a Cherry Wheat with dinner, a Cherry Wheat on your balcony, a Cherry Wheat to help you slog through that interminable sociology paper – that made sense. Sam Adams may be responsible for introducing me to the concept of drinking in moderation.*
A few weeks ago, I went down to the beach with some old college friends. We picked up a six-pack of Cherry Wheat for old times’ sake. Like many other adolescent fixations (Bright Eyes, a cute girl from that freshman history seminar), it hasn’t held up particularly well. But I still feel obliged to tip my hat to Sam Adams, because I don’t think I would have started drinking beer (as opposed to merely enduring it) if I hadn’t first encountered Cherry Wheat.
*If I had to reform our drinking laws, I think I’d allow minors to consume alcohol if they’re supervised by a parent or some other responsible adult. The idea being that adults not only moderate kids’ drinking habits, but they also can afford to buy the good stuff, which is better suited to social drinking.
“*If I had to reform our drinking laws, I think I’d allow minors to consume alcohol if they’re supervised by a parent or some other responsible adult. The idea being that adults not only moderate kids’ drinking habits, but they also can afford to buy the good stuff, which is better suited to social drinking.”
But then how would kids learn the virtues of PBR or Old Milwaukee?Report
Last I checked, Wisconsin has drinking laws like that.Report
@Aaron W, I had no idea. Wisconsinites sound like eminently sensible folks. Report
Really, @Will? They’ve also got the They’ve also got the highest percentage of binge drinkers in the country.Report
@Ryan Davidson, I suspect that has more to do with the weather than the drinking laws. But I did not know that, either.Report
I recall going to parties during my first year of college and realizing that unless we wanted to bring a bottle of vodka and a mixer to every party, my friends and I had better learn to drink beer. 2 or 3 of us would purchase a six-pack and sit behind my garage trying to choke them down. At some point a friend of mine suggested I try Rolling Rock. To me it tasted like cream soda compared to the Miller Light I was trying to drink. This eventually lead to Budwesier (still my favorite pilsner) and after a lot of experimenting I can drink just about anything but Miller and Old Milwaukee now.
As a side note I still love PBR during the summer. It’s a light beer and goes down smooth on a hot day. I’m also a big fan of our local favorite, Falls City.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, I still have a soft spot for PBR, actually. And after awhile, you really do acquire a taste for American pilsner.Report
Dogfish Head’s Raison D’Etre was my gateway drug. I’ll be honest, if I’m in for a long night of drinking, I’ll probably stick with Miller Lite or PBR (for both economic and volume-consumption reasons). But if I’m just enjoying one or two beers and I find a place that has Raison D’Etre either on tap or in bottles, that’s my drink. It was the first beer I ever tried that reminded me of something as complex as an aged bourbon or a decent glass of red wine.
http://www.dogfish.com/brews-spirits/the-brews/year-round-brews/raison-detre.htmReport
@Sonny Bunch, I will enthusiastically cosign any raison d’etre endorsement. Dogfish Head is great.Report
If you like cherry flavored beer, try Glacier Brewing Company’s Flathead Cherry next time you’re in Montana.Report
I can top anyone for lousy first beer stories- my roomates and I used to drink something we called “road beer”… I don’t know if I should even explain what that meant.
For me, the gateway drug dealer was a fellow in the philosophy club- we used to meet at a pub- who cringed at my Budweiser and bought me a hefeweizen. Ah, beer started to make sense!Report
I didn’t drink until college, and I went to college in Portland, OR in the early 90s – both the beer and the music were lucky finds. My first beer experiences was probably Henry Weinhard’s, but I quickly moved on to Full Sail, Widmer, Deschutes and Bridgeport. I really had to learn which low cost beers were tolerable – I’m a Milwaukee’s Best man myself.Report
I was a tee-totaler until just before going to France for a year studying abroad. I said to my pals, “They drink wine with EVERYTHING in France, so I need to learn how to drink.” My pals got me liquored up on Jack Daniels and amused themselves with my antics for the rest of the evening.
But on to the point: The school I went to in France (INSA-Lyon) had an on-campus bar and an off-campus bar that might as well have been on the fairly small campus. So, my first beers were German weissbiers, marzens, Belgian krieks and doubles (there was this one called Judas that was 9% alcohol), and, in a pinch, French ’33 from the convenience store. Even that, which most of the locals considered swill, was a beautiful pilsner. And in fact, Budweiser tasted pretty good on that side of the Atlantic.
I was spoiled for States-side American pilsners for life. On returning to the U.S., I just avoided beer for the most part–that was fairly easy, as I was still under 21. Later, when I lived in a fraternity house for a few weeks one summer and was offered Natural Light at their parties, I would accept it, sneak into my room and pour it out, and replace it with tequila or something else that didn’t make me gag.
The first American beer I found that I actually liked…was also Sam Adams Cherry Wheat.Report