Teetotal

Agreed, I tried many fancy, crafty, european beers, IPAs and whatnot. In the end they all tasted pretty bad and I only drank that stuff to ... get drunk. Almost any other alcoholic beverage there is tastes better than beer imo.

A lot of America hasn’t recovered from Prohibition; they’ve lost the taste for it. During Prohibition, all you’d get is bathtub gin or still hootch, and that’d be mixed and flavored. When the bad times ended, Americans didn’t return to ales in the same way, but Budweiser, with added Rice as a grain mix, was popular because of the smoother taste and in the next few generations it quickly became the leading, and definitive, American beer taste. 1970s-1990s found imports. Craft brew became more popular as people, generally folks who traveled abroad and knew that good ales existed and also didn’t mind paying more for a bottle, started to migrate from imports like Bass and Guinness to local microbrews if they were available (hello Colorado) and slowly it all took a foothold.

I feel that beer & ales can be a generational taste, swinging like fashion (who really drinks Becks now, right?). Maybe a bit like “pizza cognition theory”, where your earliest experiences with a slice define what you think “real” pizza should taste like.

Edited for grammar. Man, mine sucks now.

I think some beer tastes really, really good. So good that I will drink a substantial quantity of it in one sitting.

And that's why I don't touch it anymore.

Funny enough I thought the same when I was in college, cheap beer tastes horrible(then I didn't drink much it was only weed). But a good beer in a hot day? Man that is the most refreshing thing in the world. A sensation we have shared with other people for 5000 years or more.

say you have an unrefined palette without saying you have an unrefined palette.

ITT: People who drink tons of beer get very defensive about how beer tastes to people who don't like it