Better Drinking

Do you remember your first beer? Do you remember your response? If you're like me, that memory is probably not very good. If you're like me, you drank an adult beverage as a teenager, and you drank something less than well-crafted. Beer was nasty, at least the beers widely available and to those of us less than legal drinking age. More specifically, those beers were usually acquired by raiding someone's Dad's fridge or bought by someone's older brother. But wherever it came from, you didn't really enjoy it - you drank it because your idiot friends did and it seemed like wisdom and joy at that moment. The only appreciation you had for beer was that someone else bought it and you never got busted for drinking it. However, an adult beverage like beer, and I am talking about well-crafted beverages here, is an acquired taste, a taste that requires a bit of discipline, insight, and thought.

Now, let's ask another question - what was the beer that introduced you into the broader orbit of the malt and hop world? Whatever it was, it shook up your expectation and presented a challenge to the taste buds that required re-categorization of beer itself. Beer can taste like this? And so begins a journey that never really ends; the discipline of appreciation. Of course, I'm using beer as the prime example, but the principle is applicable to any number of things. The things we eat, and enjoy, change and shape over the years and it does take years to appreciate certain things. Picky eaters become connoisseurs of things that their fathers couldn't threaten them to eat when they were children. This principle even applies to people, in that it requires discipline (and love) to deal with certain people we interact with on a regular basis. In fact, I would argue that love is the triumph of appreciation and enjoyment for the "otherness" of others, over and above the appreciation and enjoyment for self. Those who appreciate only self are not very likeable people.

But back to my main point here. Appreciation takes effort and discipline, especially if we are to expand our palate to the point where any number beers are good, depending on the context and circumstance. And here, proverbially speaking, is what separates the men from the boys because I'm not just talking one style, but all of them. The well-rounded palate enjoys lagers and ales, darks and lights, barleys and wheats, cold and room-temp, carbonated and flat, sweet and sour, and so on. Favorites may have a place, but it takes discipline to truly appreciate things we don't consider as such. And with any discipline, it takes time. No one becomes a master at anything in a few months; we must invest patience and time into those things that are worth mastering.

You may be asking yourself - does the word "appreciation" or "discipline" really belong in the same context as beer?

Only the disciplined will know that.