The first beer that you loved

Yuengling was the beer that taught me yes, beer can taste good after all.

However, the first stout I ever tried (before even Guinness) was FBS. That was the first beer to ever make me love it so much, I wanted the glass to last forever. The kind of beer that made me want to not eat/drink anything else afterwards to keep it on my palate. Now that is true beer love.

 

I can't remember which one it was, but one is a boring answer (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) and the other one isn't : that's Little Creatures Pale Ale so I'm going with that one. I've basically started drinking serious beers while in Australia. They don't have that many good beers to be honest there, only a few. Little Creatures, Hop Hog, Stone & Wood, that kind of thing. New Zealand had Epic Brewery and that was about it. Now I'm sure more good stuff is available, but I've left and in Europe you won't find good beers from Oz/NZ.

 

If I recall, one of the very earliest I loved was Belhaven Scottish ale. That got me into different stuff, and I also started loving Belgian Trappist ales as well as the standards I started with.

 

1995...Highland Oatmeal Porter

Its not even on my radar anymore, although I tend to have one or 2 a year, but when Highland first opened and this beer hit my lips, it was love a first sip!

Before then, I was a Newcastle and McEwan's fan for a few years (before I was legal) but the Oatmeal Porter turned me to the dark/malty side of beer for a decade+ until I started drinking more IPAs.

 

I'd been enjoying cask ales all summer in England and great lagers in Germany, then I came back home to college and discovered Summit Great Northern Porter. I thought it was brilliant. That was a long time ago, and there are much better porters out there now, but...I've still got a soft spot for it.

 

Lagunitas Waldo. I liked beer before then, but that was the first one that blew my mind when I had it on tap one 4/20.

 

Fat Tire.

This was well before New Belgium distro'd to Louisiana, and I was brand spanking new to drinking any kind of alcohol.
I did expose myself to the macro garbage, but luckily for me I was on a senior college trip in Colorado and decided to try something that my class mates werent into drinking. I proceeded to try and play kings cup and a couple other drinking games with the Fat Tire, but i remember it being so "heavy and filling" in my mind.

lol oh how times have changed, but i am forever grateful to Fat Tire Amber Ale for showing me that there is more to
drinking and this hobby than sucking down cheap sweet corn flavored watered down swill

 

Odell IPA

 

The first beer I ever loved was Guinness extra stout. My buddies used to give me shit for drinking "motor oil" all the time.

As far as craft, my first love was LH Nitro Milk Stout. It reminded me of a better version of Guinness

 

Anchor Liberty Ale by miles...
honorable mention to Heineken Dark

 

Ommegang Abbey Ale

 

When I was in college and started to get into beer, I tried a bunch of imports and was surprised how different they were from the Bud/Coors/Michelob I'd been getting. But then Sam Adams Boston Lager came out and that was it. That's the beer that started me on my craft journey, and even after having 2000+ different beers I always have a soft spot for it. It's available at most bars around here and better than most of the other offerings so it's my go-to beer when the other stuff on tap sucks and I don't want to spend $10 for a bottle.

Honorable mention goes to Pete's Wicked Ale and Pete's Wicked Multi-Grain.

 

One of the beers that got me into craft was Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Still love the shit out that beer. Also, the first time I had Victory Golden Monkey around the same time, I thought it was one of the greatest beers ever. I still enjoy it, but not nearly to that extent.

 

I can relate.
In the late '60s/early '70s my friends used to razz me about my beer choices too since I never drank "normal" beers: Ballantine IPA was my #1 choice. In addition to the IPA, I also primarily enjoyed Ballantine XXX, Yuengling Porter, Pabst Bock, Löwenbrau Maerzen and Dunkel, and Guinness Extra. Occasionally, I would even make Black and Tans with some Bally XXX and Guinness Extra.

The Guinness was an interesting case though...I always loved Guinness Extra from the first time I tasted it (I think I was around 19) but when I eventually tasted Guinness Draught a couple of years later I was somewhat disappointed: it was the first time I ever tasted a draft beer that wasn't superior to the bottled version (I found out later of course that it was a totally different beer from a different recipe than regular Guinness).

Ballantine XXX has been cited a few times in this thread. It was a definitely a pretty impressive brew for it's time and when it was still available on draught in it's classic form it was even better. As aromatically hoppy as the bottled/canned versions were, the draft version was exponentially better by virtue of the fact that like all draft beers, it was never subject to pasteurization.

 

Like most on here I started with the tasteless mass produced swill beers. Bud, Miller and even strayed over to Malt Liquor for awhile like Mickeys Big Mouth but first beer I really loved was Sierra Nevada Pale Ale which is what got me hooked and led me to try other IPAs and become the total Hop Head that I am today.

 

Lefthand Nitro Milk Stout.

 

Not the first but skipping down the Primrose path of craft I sort of simultaneously ran into Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Sam Adams Lager.

 

Portland Lager. Any Northern New Englanders remember this from the late 80s?

In 1986, I had just tried Sam Adams - my first craft beer - and been blown away when someone suggested I might like Portland Lager. It was love at first sip.

I moved away (from NH) a couple of years later, drank a lot more Sam Adams, but never even saw or even heard of Portland Lager again. Just did some research and it doesn't look like the brewery lasted long but I have very fond memories of that beer.

 

Was it ever an actual brewery? (Maine Coast Brewing Co. was their legal name). I remember it primarily as just one more of the huge wave of contract-brewed beers that followed New Amsterdam Amber Beer and Samuel Adams Boston Lager in the 1980s. Portland Lager was brewed at Walter Brewing in WI and later at F X Matt in Utica, NY.

 

You're right. I carelessly called it a brewery. Apparently, they had plans to open an actually brewery but the building they planned to use burned down before they got going.