Tips for a Beer Newbie

I agree totally. I frequent my local shop and know the owner and his wife personally. They save me single release beers or hard to get ones. He actually put aside a Cantillon for me when I was on vacation just because I said I never had one.

Another good tip. Treat your fellow traders well and you will forever have a friend that will look out for beers you may enjoy. This is a great community with some really good people. Enjoy and relaxe with a cold one, you are in for a beautiful ride!

Happy Halloween!

 

Dude--you rated Bestway in Gboro--great. In Charlotte go to Brawley's and in the mts-Chris Riley at Peabodys. All are OUTSTANDING.

 

I love seeing threads like these. Not sure just how new you are but... When I first got into it I wanted to try the easiest going samples of every style first. Once I found a couple styles I really liked I explored those first. Then tried the ones I thought were not as great, and as my taste changed I slowly got into more and more styles. Last one to get into was probably ipa's and belgian quads. I used to really dislike the bitterness in ipa's but love it now. Goes to show you, what you think you like and don't like might change with the amount of exposure you have.

 

OK. Just go buy a Smuttynose Finest Kind, a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and a local IPA of any description and remember to report back about the differences. OK? What's amazing is that these are earthy flowery plants that make beer, somehow, magically.

 

1) drink lots of beer of all types. mixed six packs are your friend.
2) do not be afraid to pour a beer down the drain if you don't like it. i seriously don't understand people that say OMG DON'T EVER DRAIN POUR and will literally suffer through drinking bad beer.
3) attend bottle shares. all those crazy beers you see flying through the ISO:FT boards? this is probably your best chance to try many of them. people in the beer world are usually generous as fuck and will think nothing of pouring you a bit of black tuesday or bcbs or <insert random beer here> without expecting anything in return.
4) don't get into trading. i'm only half kidding about this, but 90% of the time, what you get in return isn't necessarily any better than what you can pick up locally. when you get to the point where trading sounds like a good idea, you'll probably know enough about what you want.

 

You will also hear a lot of bullshit. In beer, as in life, the quicker you learn to detect the difference, the smoother things will go. Welcome aboard, and Cheers!

 

Beer that is a little warmer is often far better than "ice cold" beer. If you can't taste it, it's too cold.

 

Pay attention to bottle dates and don't buy old beer because you'll be wasting your money.

 

Refrigerated beer keeps longer but most beer is meant to drink with in six months of bottling. Hop flavors are the first thing to disappear from beer over time so beers with lots of hops, drink now. Think of beer like produce, you can keep it on the counter for a couple days before using it but if you put it in the fridge it stays fresh 2-3 times longer.

 

Give Sweetwater beers a shot, most notably their IPA, Lowryeder, and 420

 

oh yeah, this.

5) 99.999999999% of all beer should be drank fresh. fresh is best defined as 'within 6 months of bottle date' unless it's an IPA (or a very hop-dependent beer) in which case you should cut that to 3 months at most.

 

Stay away from sours, your wallet will thank you. Oh, and welcome!

 

Go to store, buy a new beer, drink, rock out, repeat. Oh, and do some reading.

 

Why are you eating "flowers n stuff"?

 

Don't buy a beer based strictly on it's ratings. Many of the "world class" beers rated on this site are undrinkable in my opinion (here's looking at you Bigfoot and DFH 90 Minute), so take ratings with a grain of salt and buy what you like, not what everyone says is the best.

 

Welcome to the family. Try to stay away from the "chasing latest craze/ticking beers off your list" mentality, that's only a recipe for disappointment and an empty bank account, and not what drinking beer is about. Also, try everything you can find locally, don't pass anything off because of a label design, crappy name, or a style you thought you didn't/wouldn't like. And last, take the ratings here with a grain of salt. I often find beers in the 80 ratings more palatable to me than the highly sought after ones in the high 90's.

 

Too many times I've ended up disappointed and out of hard-earned cash because I thought I was going to get something phenomenal and ended up with a drain-pour. I agree with your suggestion of trying beers in the mid-80's range, as I too have found most of them not only more palatable but less expensive. It's a rule of thumb of course, but it can mean the difference between finding something you love and having buyer's remorse (hehe, that rhymed).

 

^^ nice haul

I like SA, but don't think that one is gonna become an IPA lover drinking only SA IPA's. I enjoy a more juicy/west coast IPA and have found that SA's tend to be too malty and earthy (like you said) for my tastes.

My advice for OP
Try new beers, but don't feel like you are trying new beers cuz you have to. If you got a beer you loved, its okay to buy another six pack instead of having to try every other beer in the world before going back to it.

 

Great advice