Back to School, BA-style

Drinking beer is easy. Enjoying it is pretty easy, too. But when it comes to learning more about beer, most people are stumped. One of the most frequently asked questions we get is: “I want to learn more about beer, but where should I start?” The “where” might be obvious to many of you, but others may simply need a nudge in the right direction.

Explore beer
Buy outside of your comfort zone. Pick a new beer each week, create a beer hit list, explore a style range, work your way through a brewpub sampler. Make sure to look up each new beer to find out more about it.

Stop and think
It’s so underrated, but stopping for a moment while you’re drinking a beer to think about it is a beautiful thing. What do you taste? Make some food associations if you can’t think of the exact words, or simply focus on your enjoyment of its character.

Be vocal and social
Beer is the ultimate social lubricant. Find some likeminded friends (maybe on BeerAdvocate.com?), host a tasting and talk about the beers, ask a local brewer some questions, talk about beer online. You’ll find that most people don’t get bored talking about beer—unless, that is, they’re not into beer.

Attend a beer fest
This kind of goes hand-in-hand with exploring beer, but attending a beer fest can be a real eye-opener. For starters, you’ll realize that the options for better beer are virtually endless—at our first Great American Beer Festival, we dropped to our knees in awe and shed tears of joy. Fests are also a great chance to try brews before you buy them, learn more from industry professionals and meet other beer enthusiasts.

Brew your own
The best way to get to know beer is by brewing it. You’ll learn how the ingredients work together, discover beer styles from a different perspective, and understand a bit more about what actually goes into a beer. Look for local homebrew clubs in your area, or, if you don’t want to invest in homebrewing, visit your local brew-on-premises (BOP) facility and brew a batch there. You don’t have to brew weekly, like we did, but give it a try now and then. Who knows where it might lead?

Review a beer
A great way to train your palate is by taking notes. It gets all of the senses on the same page (literally) and you’ll begin to develop your very own beer vocabulary. We first started taking notes with our homebrew, and then eventually applied it to every beer that came our way. This eventually led to dozens of reviews on a website—a process that was so useful to us, we opened it up to other users.

Reading is fundamental
If you’re serious about learning more about beer, you should start your own library. We can still recall reading Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing and Ray Daniels’s Designing Great Beers over and over again. Buy a new beer book every month, subscribe to beer mags and pick up regional zines. Read everything you can.

Attend a beer dinner
Beer and food are a natural match. Learning how both worlds relate and discovering the similarities between the two can get you thinking about beer on an entirely different level. Plus, it’s fun and tasty. Attend a local brewer’s dinner, pair some beers with a selection of cheeses or try cooking with beer at home.

Travel for beer
There’s simply nothing better than drinking beer at the source, learning about foreign beer cultures, exploring a new beer scene, meeting new people over a beer or visiting a brewery for a tour. A single trip can be enlightening and change your entire view of beer.

By simply revisiting these basic steps to beerdom from time to time, even some of you hardcore beer geek veterans might be surprised at how much you still don’t know about beer. Personally, we discover something new about beer every day. ■