By Herr Mike
I have been drinking beer for more than half my adult life now and it got me thinking, “Why do I drink beer?”
If you asked me that question when I was a teenager ( Yeah my parents knew I drank before I was legal , which was only 18 by the way) I would have said “To get drunk man!” and that would be an accurate statement.
As I got older things really didn’t change much , but as I discovered craft beer I realize it was more than just getting buzzed.
There were other alcoholic beverages that could get me drunk just as fast, if not faster, but I found that I actually liked the taste of beer!
Is it an inherited trait that we drink what we drink? My dad was always a beer drinker and when I was a kid my dad and my grandfather would give me sips from their beer bottle or can.
My grandfather would even do boilermakers. I found out the hard way that I couldn’t mix beer and hard liquor and as much as I tried it would end in disaster.
Now, back in the day when I first started drinking beer there were no big craft breweries like there are today.
My friends and I would always buy imported beer like Heineken or Grolsch (with those resealable tops) because we thought that if it was from Europe it was better than Budweiser (which used to give me nasty headaches) and any other American brewed beer.
Thinking back I never liked the taste of those Euro macros that we drank (most of that beer was probably skunked) so I started to gravitate to beers like Blue Moon which I thought at the time was craft beer.
It wasn’t until I started drinking Celis White that I really got on board with craft beer. After that I started getting exposed to breweries like Sam Adams , Dogfish Head, Flying Dog , Sierra Nevada and Stone and as they say, the rest is history.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think that beer would be such a big part of my life. Do I still seek out the beer buzz? Yeah, there are times when I think it makes me more social or creative (I’m writing this article as I drink a couple brewskies), or at the end of a long hard day at work when I want to decompress.
I have also met many amazing people that I probably wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for beer. I even got paid to sell beer, so it was my full time job for a while.
So when I really start to think why I drink beer, the answer is simple, I really love beer. PROST!
Herr Mike is beer nerd, author, composer & creator of Planet Beer on Facebook & 2LoveBeer.com, dating for beer lovers and PlanetBeerGear.com Custom Beer T-Shirts & Hoodies.