Gateway to Craft

Sierra Nevada was my gateway. I discovered hops from there. Up until that point I had been exposed to Sam Adams a lot and hated it. I'm still not a big SA BL fan, but love all other things craft.

 

Sam Adams and Samuel Smith's were my gateways to better beer. Somehow I seem to have skipped boarding the Sierra Nevada train - and that is still embarrassingly true for the most part. Prior to that, I drank ridiculously large quantities of any cheap beer I could get my hands on. Happy to say I have matured in that regard!

 

Shandy variety 12 pack in cans - that's the official steering wheel cooler drink on my lawn mower. I have right around a 2 hour cut every weekend, and those things go down like tasty flavored water and don't put my non-mowing areas in jeopardy due to getting all out of whack on alcohol.

 

I remember having Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat a bunch but didn't really get into craft beer until my GF fell in love with Magic Hat #9 at a party she went to so after having this shared spark of interest we found Dogfish beer was readily available at every liquor store we went to so we jumped on the Dogfish train. After hundreds and hundreds of beers under our belt it's fun going back to the beers that started it all and noticing how different our palates are now, Magic Hat #9 is pretty much water to me

 

My gateway was imports, mostly German beers in the days of leasure suits and disco balls

 

Great Divide Yeti and Celebrator

 

Started out drinking anything I hadn't seen before. A trip to Amsterdam in 71 for three months with a couple of weeks in England opened the flood gates. Café Belgique on Gravenstraat (8 Belgians on tap and 50 bottled versions) was an alley or two from our hotel near the automat that provided most of our meals and pretty much destroyed my taste for adjunct industrial lager. Five years in Toronto at school had me hombrewing to get decent beer when I returned. Thankfully, by the early 80's craft beer started appearing and retailers started carrying more interesting imports.

 

Through most of high school i actually hated beer. I would need to take a couple shots before actually being able to put up with the taste of beer. It was just so off putting. But of course as i got into college and started drinking more and more i just got use to it. Then i started drinking different beers with a neighbor and realized it wasnt that i didnt like beer, i was just drinking the wrong ones. Now adays i can drink the light domestic beers just fine. But nothing compares to a full flavored beer.

-xICooRsYIx

 

I was raised on Genny Cream Ale, Labatts and Molson Golden...got stationed in England in 1982, and got to experience stout's and bitters, a trip to Germany and Austria exposed me to pilsners and pale lagers...first craft beer other that Sam Adams that I got into was Pete's Wicked Ale

 

Funny, it was Ashley's in Ann Arbor that put the idea in my head too! I started college at 17, so I turned 21 much later than all of my friends at school. Until I procured reliable...uh, "alternative identification", I drank whatever was coming out of house party kegs (usually Bud Light, Beast Light, Natty Light, Molson Ice, or Labatt Blue...as OP said, this was Michigan after all, so Canadian beers were as cheap & available as domestics for us). Meanwhile, come to find out my 21-and-over friends were at Ashley's, drinking their way through a smörgåsbord of craft/imported delights.

The first time I finally joined them, a good friend of mine ordered a Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, and was handed a nonic pint of what appeared to me to be used motor oil. The beer menu had hundreds of unfamiliar beers on it, and my eyes started to lose focus trying to make sense of them all, so I put myself at his mercy. He ordered me a Newcastle Brown Ale, and it was like ambrosia. After that I added Newcastle Brown Ale, Guinness, Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, and Hofbräu Oktoberfest to the rotation, but kept drinking the BMC's.

Then one day (I think it was in 2003), living in Chicago now, I was at the local Jewel (our flavor of Albertson's back then) doing some grocery shopping, and the crazy label on a bomber of 3 Floyds Munsterfest caught my eye. I took a chance on what was probably the most expensive beer I'd ever bought up to that point, but after the first sip I was pretty sure it was the best beer that had ever been brewed by man. I went back to Jewel and bought 6 more Munsterfest bombers, plus a couple other 3 Floyds beers that sounded interesting.

I still enjoy the occasional BMC - back when they had the Miller Lite and Coors Light fridge kegs, we went through like four of those one summer, and every year I go on a camping trip with 12-15 buddies where we each drink at least a case of Miller Lite, Coors Light, and/or PBR - but for the past decade or so, craft beer, especially fantastic local stuff, has become our go-to.

 

For me it was Guinness. Had one on St. Patrick's Day a while back, said, "holy shit, this beer actually isn't awful!" and decided to start trying other beers. After that, I moved on to...if I remember correctly, Old Rasputin, Great Lakes Nosferatu (a couple of my dad's favorites), and then discovered that I liked hoppy beers when I tried GI's IPA ("huh, this pale ale from India is really tasty!") and Alpha King. It's been madness ever since.

 

Living in northern California at the time, my friends were drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Didn't take too long to get me hooked on the stuff to the point that I'd turn down a Bud, preferring to just drink water. These days, when I travel, I make it a point to try a local craft beer, especially one I've never had before. Found a few good ones that way - a few less so...

 

I was into wines (still am), had Sam Adams and Blue Moon which were decent but nothing game changing.
Visited a friend in Bend last summer who took me to Boneyard, then Crux, then Deschutes... the light went on.

 

I abstained from alcohol until I was 22 because people I was close to had abused alcohol and I saw how it had negatively affected their lives and I wanted no part of that. After realizing that I had the self-control and cautious mindset that would likely keep me safe from spiraling into alcoholism, I marched to the liquor store, bought a single bottle of Ommegang Three Philosophers and the rest is history.

 

Back when I started drinking beer, I thought I was snobby because I drank Icehouse while other people had something like a Bud Lite. That phase lasted for an embarrassingly long period of time, before I saw a Guinness poured and served to someone near me at a bar. I thought it looked interesting, so I gave it a try, and liked it. That remained my one and only beer for quite some time, until a coworker had me try some Smithwick's while we were hitting up a happy hour. That made me a regular drinker of two beers, rather than a one beer loyalist.

Not too long after that, another friend pointed me at Samuel Smith's Nut Brown and Taddy Porter, and building from there, I took a chance on a six pack of something that looked interesting at the local grocery store called Edmund Fitzgerald. As I gushed about that one to some friends, one of them suggested I might also like the Eliot Ness, and thus was my craft beer fandom wrought.

I'm actually glad it went this route, as I'm certain trying a hoppy beer or two prior to learning there was plenty of other stuff out there would have driven me right back into the arms of Icehouse or Guinness.

 

SNPA, 60 min, and Hop Devil early on...then I had Stone IPA and my eyes were officially open

 

Love this thread!

I'm from a town in Indiana with a very strong macro mentality. Natty Ice is all anyone wants, ever. It was fine during college, but every time I was in the bottle shop, I would be so interested in all the different types of beer they actually had. I was always checking out the Three Floyds bottles because I thought they looked cool. I never bought any because I couldn't afford it, but I wanted to learn what all this stuff was.

The big gateway beers for me were Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, Sam Adams Cherry Wheat, and Bell's Oberon. These were sometimes in my price range, and I was digging the wheat flavors. I drank a lot of other stuff from those three breweries and then got into Shiner and New Belgium. To this day, I have probably consumed more Shiner Black Lager than anything else. I would just go into any bottle shop and buy whatever I had never heard of to figure out what styles and which breweries I liked. I drank some absolutely terrible local beer, but luckily I was able to keep an open mind and never let anything turn me off from continuing to explore.

I HATED IPAs for a long time, but when I moved to Denver, it was game over for me. It's pretty tough to live in Denver and not get completely sucked into the craft beer scene. I learned to love everything and developed my hop obsession.
It's fun to think back to all those crappy/mediocre beers that I once loved. I was always forcing some new stuff on my friends and they always refused or just hated it. Now they are all into craft beer too, and a lot of them regularly ask for advice or recommendations.

 

I started college in the late 80's, a time before "micro-brews" really took off. Like most college drunkards, I drank cheap beer and liquor when I started. Then through various friends, acquaintances, and strangers, I was introduced to better beer. An upperclassman with Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout, a choir tour host with Sam Adams Winter Lager, another host with his homemade pale ale. I still didn't dive headfirst into beer, but I started buying the occasional sixpack of Guinness, Bass, or Sam Adams instead of my $3.97 twelve-packs of Schaeffer Light.

By the mid-nineties, I was a full on beer geek, buying anything I could find, and traveling to beer festivals and brewpubs, as well as home brewing. Now, I don't go far out of my way for every new beer that comes around, but there's a hell of a lot more beer available without hunting. I love a broad range of beer, but never buy BMCs. (will drink one on very rare occasions)

 

During college - my first "better" beers were stuff like Magic Hat #9, Pete's Wicked, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Bass Ale, Newcastle Brown.