Your Gateway Beer to Craft

Great Lakes Christmas Ale for me and I still to this day love it.

 

Smithwicks was the first beer I truly enjoyed drinking without the express purpose of getting drunk. It all started there.

 

Can't remember exactly which one was first but back in the day when I realized there was life beyond Bud Light it was either Sam Adams Boston Lager or the Saranac Trail Mix which included Adironodack Lager, Black and Tan, and I think the other one was Pale Ale.

 

SN Torpedo

 

Pete's wicked ale and Pete's strawberry blond. Really liked 'em both!

 

Newcastle Brown Ale, which then led me to Bell's Best Brown.

 

SA Boston Lager and Stella Artois when I was ~20-21.

 

First craft I ever had was Sammy Smith Oatmeal Stout. I was younger and my dad liked it.

First I ever bought was Sam Adams Black Lager.

The beers that truly started my obsession were Rogue Dead Guy, Duvel, SN PA, and 90 Minute. To this day, I still love all of them except 90.

 

For me it was Ruination. Was headed out for lunch and stopped for a beer. That beer was the beginning of a long and healthy love of beer. Might as well start with the biggest most bitter one out there. I thought it was sensational.

=)

 

Roughly 10 years ago when i was 18 I had Arrogant Bastard...so maybe that, however once I had Old Rasputin I was hooked. It was the first time I would buy beer to drink alone and drink it slow and savor it.

 

Yuenglings Lord Chesterfield. Until then I had just assumed that all beers tasted like bud, miller, etc.

 

I was always trying different beers at the store once I turned 21, for a while I went with killians irish red and Stellas. I tried Long Trail Double bag and wasn't a hug fan but it got me on the internet looking for a possible beer review site and found this place. I tried Wachusett Brown ale and loved it and began buying any craft brown ale I saw. I then began moving to other types of beers, but I still haven't grown the liking of hoppy IPAs

 

2001 i had had a few betterish beers. An old roommate even bought me a book of beer reviews. Saranac from my time in way upstate ny was the best I had experienced by that point.

2004 I come to boston (and for the first time have disposable income)...harpoon ipa is everywhere...

2013 I've got a closet full of beer and an annoyed girlfriend

 

Samuel Adams definitely turned me onto craft beer, just with all the different flavors and varieties. I am into more now it sucks because when I'm at school in PA there is nowhere to buy craft beer where I am at, but when I'm at home in Ohio over breaks I can explore more varieties.

 

Newcastle, Hacker Pschorr and Celis White. My Busch Light Draft drinking friends always got on me for drinking the "expensive" beers. Good thing sours and once a year DIPAs weren't widespread in my college days. I wouldn't have been able to afford food.

 

I think my awakening came in '99 or so, and it was Anchor Steam. After that I got into Pete's Wicked Ale, Sierra Nevada and others.
When I was young and single I would buy the Michael Jackson beer books, go to the closest World Market and load up with whatever I could find. I remember my first real "beer hunt" was Samiclaus, that was probably 2001 or so. Good times.

 

I really don't know for sure but probably Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout.

 

I didn't so much have a gateway beer as a gateway experience. I spent the Autumn of 1980 (I'm aware that this makes me an old fart in this venue...) in Ireland, Scotland and England with a side trip to Germany and Austria. I ran across Guinness, Murphys, Smithwicks, Bass, John Courage, Newkie Brown, Hofbrauhaus, Spaten, and forty or fifty other brews that I can't remember now - but they all tasted like something, as opposed to what I had been drinking as a college kid back in the states. Once I got back, I started looking around for similar stuff. Anchor Steam was around back then, but I spent a lot of time drinking imports. After a few years, the microbrew scene cranked up. At that point, there was no reason to drink stuff that had been shipped across an ocean (with a few exceptions). Been drinking local ever since...

 

Mount Begbie Powerhouse Pale Ale while vacationing in British Columbia