Heineken: 0

I am proud of you 🥹

What a great project. What I like most is the attitude of ‘it’s not my thing, but let’s explore’. My motto is ‘the more you taste, the better you know what you (don’t) like.’ I’ve worked with beer a lot and I dislike it when people dismiss things without properly trying.

A couple of observations. You like roasted barley a lot, big stouts/portres have your preference. The coffee like flavor suits you. Normally people disliking beer are turned on by bitter flavors like hop or dark malt, so the IPA’s scoring high surprised me.

Like others said, some fruity sour types like Neipa, kriek and gose could be fun to try. Also Belgian heavy dark ales and tripel like Rochefort or Chimay if you can get them. Belgian dark sours like duchesse du Bourgogne are interesting (dark/balsamic).

Interesting transformations with food: combine some dark chocolate with a heavy stout, and it taste differently as the chocolate and dark malt filter each other out. Second: combine salty food (or even a couple of grains of salt) with hoppy beers (IPA’s) the salt fiets out the bitter.

Anyway, thanks for the inspiring life attitude!

no sour ales, no NEIPAs, no sessions, no pastry sours. stouts stouts stouts, a few ipas, and basic lagers/pilsners. you could have covered much more with this quantity if you’d just have one person who really likes and knows and tastes beers. come to Ukraine, you’ll have the tastiest beers you’ll ever have. none of them will be imported. also, beer sharing and food pairing are the ways the beer tastes better. it’s a social drug, don’t forget that.

Beers are rated on a standardized scale of bitterness called IBU. This isn’t typically printed on the can, but it’s usually something you can find online. A lower IBU will probably appeal more to you, looking at your data - but sweetness itself is not indicated by a low IBU, for which you should consider the style.

Your top picks are all darker, maltier, sweeter styles obviously, but I don’t see any pastry/dessert stouts on your list, which you may like. They’re not yet very common, but if you chat up the bartender at any local brewery you’ve got a chance to find something.

Well, I’m with you. I’ve tried some of those, and on my personal scale of enjoyment, I wouldn’t put any of those over a 20, much less as high as fifty.

When I drink beer, I want low hops, yeastiness, and a strong malt forward flavor, or it’s a non starter. I’ll take a sip, and it can fuck right off. I’ve made okay friends with belgian wheat beers though. Not something I’ll go out of my way to drink, but if I’m going to provide beer for guests that will want me to drink with them, that’s what we’re having lol. Or they can bring their own.

Like you, alcohol in and of itself isn’t something I enjoy. So, even with bourbon, which is my preference when I’m drinking something on the rare occasion I want a touch of the effects of alcohol but still enjoy the flavor, I go with lower proof stuff. Tbh, chilled, even stronger bourbon becomes more enjoyable. Ice when necessary, but I prefer it to just be cold; if I want it watered, I’d rather add water.

But, and I think you might end up in a similar way, there are things other than beer that contain alcohol. I love cider. Even the usual store brands like angry orchard is enjoyable on a hot day. If you have any local makers, it’ll be better though. If you’ve never tried anything other than name brands, it might be worth finding and trying something more crafted.

Same with mead, tbh. Mead runs really sweet though. At times, too sweet.

But there’s also a ton of options without alcohol. There’s things like rooibos that can make a great hot or cold drink. Dandelion tea is great either way too. Hell, for that matter, dandelion wine is something special.

Around here, beer is essentially the default adult beverage. I never really liked it. But other people did, and I wanted to at least figure out what I was missing. What I found out is that most beer is pretty crap on my tongue. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t like beer either, it seems, or at least you’re even more picky than me about what’s going to be passing over your gums.

It’s all in how the tongue, nose, and brain mesh up to interpret the chemicals in things. It’s why earl grey is anathema to one person, and nectar to the next. You get whatever pattern of taste buds you have, those are sending signals alongside those from your nose, and your brain has to figure out what it means. You could have a an identical twin, and still end up having differences in food preference because no matter how similar you start out, the brain shapes via experiences. At some point, tastes can diverge, and usually do, even if only in detail.

That’s from some old twin study I read back in the nineties. Twins end up liking mostly the same things, but they’ll not always like them to the same degree, and there are things that they disagree on. So, the rest of us having differences in preference is the norm, not an oddity. It’s why I poke fun at food snobs. They literally do not taste things exactly the same as the next food snob, so it’s an accident whether they like or dislike a given thing. Yeah, we have proclivities as humans; we favor things that have the right nutrients, things that trigger our brains as being desirable. But the proportions of those things are still variable. You might like 10% salt content in your chips, and the next guy thinks that’s way too much, but you’ll both want some salt.

It is cool as hell that you both tracked and shared your experiences :). I don’t believe I would have thought to do so.

If you’re dead set on getting to like beer, I’d suggest trying some of your top ones in the appropriate settings. Some beers are marvellous on a hot day, some with food, some to enjoy in a sauna or shower (it’s a thing), some as dessert and some on their own as a session drink (which I guess is how you tried your list).

Porters and stouts are often good for session, but also around food. The heaviest are sometimes good for a dessert beer.

IPAs are also typically for session, but some are nicely refreshing on a hot day.

Lagers are mostly allowed to exist because of how refreshing they are (hot day, sauna, with snacks).

There’s a lot of variety within them though, especially with craft beers, so do check with someone knowledgeable on how a specific beer is best served and enjoyed.

On the other hand, I’m just now exploring the world of iced tea. Tea is already a versatile drink, and with different techniques, mixes and ingredients I’ve found you can ruin a lot of tea.

Mostly it’s good though ;)

Oh, and in case you’ve only ever drunk sweet tea, there are many other ways to make iced tea. A classic one is to do a Turkish style strong, bitter, tea (let it cool) and mix with ice and cold water in a glass. Sweeten to taste, easiest with a sugar syrup, but any sweetener would work.

If you don’t like the bitter sharpness, I’d recommend cold brewing, even a yellow label comes out with a soft profile and you can add flavor afterward with fruit juice, squeezed lemon, dried fruit, etc.

Have you tried cider? I would recommend Wyder’s Peach or Wyder’s Pear, or Woodchuck. Though depending on your location it might be difficult to find those brands. The cider section of the beer aisle has grown in the last decade+ and there’s a ton of options now. Wyder’s and woodchuck are older brands that have been around since before the boom. Though they seem to be the most difficult to find. Bevmo should have them.

I don’t drink, either. My father became abusive when he drank, so I never wanted to go there. Turns out this may have been the right move, even if by accident.

If you’re not a huge beer drinker, you should probably avoid giving much weight to the ratings on BeerAdvocate. I always treat those ratings with a huge grain of salt. They tend to rate “extreme” and/or hard to find beers much higher than I think they normally would be rated if people were doing a blind taste test.

Conversely, they also rate some of the more common or easy drinking beers – beers that are world class examples of their respective styles – much lower than deserved because they are not flavor explosions.

Finally, so many of those top rated beers on BeerAdvocate are going to be way to over the top for most people. E.g. I notice from your sheet that you have beers like KBS and Speedway Stout on there. If you have not already been drinking bourbon in your coffee before you began this journey, those are some heavy hitters that take a lot of palette adjustment to be able to appreciate.

No sours, no lambic, no kriek, no hazy stuff - ok, you don’t like “classic” beers, but you tried a fraction of possible tastes.
For something more “traditional”, try Bourgogne des Flandres - it’s a mix on lambic (made by Timmermans, thy their own beers as well) and dark beer, and this beer is stored in wine barrells, giving it additional wine aftertaste (but the taste is really rich anyway). The thing is, and it applies to many other beers, is that it’s genuinely tasty, no “it’s supposed to be bitter” bullshit. There is a shitton of sour or fruity beers in Belgium in general.
And as another, more punk example (of course, there are “purists” who will say “it’s not beer”), try something like “Gelato sourpuss - Monday motivation” - it’s a mango chili beer, and it tastes like a baby puree with chili. I’m not saying this exact beer, but what I mean is that there’s a lot of really weird stuff, but it can be cool and tasty.
Explore. Because you tried many variations of several types of beer. It might be hard to understand you don’t see the whole spectrum - in Denmark where I live, people tend to drink simple beers like Tuborg and Carlsberg (lagers and pilsners, nothing special), and when you ask for “something else”, they proudly present you their lineup of five IPAs “for the weird people”

I should probably warn you, if you are wanting beers that other people will serve you you will often find that they will be serving a macro rather than something more exotic.

The good thing about stouts and porters is that you don’t necessarily want to drink huge amounts of them. They are filling and can be made to last quite a while.

Temperature seems to be a big variable that you aren’t tracking, different beers are best at different temperature, the colder the beer the less you taste, which can be a good thing or a bad thing.

I have a hunch most people’s favorites would be quite different than the ratings on BA.