❤️‍🔥🌲Rachel

I feel very lucky. My first beer was an Augustiner Hefeweizen enjoyed on a rainy summer afternoon in Bavaria, near Regensburg. I was a huge dork, so I treated the glass with the care I saw adults handle a bottle of good vintage. After my first sip I was delighted to find that not only was beer not an acquired taste, but that I had immediately found my new favorite drink. This gave me a lifelong love of beer that I still have. Dweeb that I was, I immediately put the bottle down to take a photo and document it, then wrote notes on my phone about how it tasted: crisp, like banana and nutmeg, slightly appley, pleasantly bitter, and another flavor I would later learn was malt. It was July 2nd, 2016. This experience affected me so deeply that I stopped drinking soda entirely, except in the occasional mixed drink much later on. It killed the appeal of Coke and Mountain Dew. By comparison they seemed gross: simultaneously disgustingly sweet and acidic and altogether lacking in complexity. I think people are prejudiced because they drink nasty crap for fratbros first and only get to the good stuff much later. Beer seems like an acquired taste because the bad stuff comes first, so liking it looks like something you grow into. Some people will never like it (mostly those who cannot appreciate anything bitter), but for most I suspect that, if they started with something good and not bad, they would have an experience more similar to mine than to the average zoomer complaining about it being icky. Dan later explains that his objections also apply to wine and coffee beneath this post. All he is missing is tea. If he included that he'd have a complete set of the most popular drinks in human history.