I reckon Belgium has alot to offer in regards to hallelula moment beers which arnt palate bruising.

I’ve spent years trying to convert my girlfriend and it has had the complete opposite effect. She used to have a few lagers and now doesn’t touch anything. When I insist on her tasting she takes such a pathetic little sip that it must evaporate through her nose before she gets to taste it.

It breaks my heart to watch but like any spurned lover, I can’t let it go and know I’ll be back for more.

Continuing the wine parallel – when there’s an overall decline of wine drinking figures in traditional wine drinking countries, it generally coincides with a switch over to less wine of a better quality. If that happens with beer, then great – there are health benefits of lower drinking and a beer market based less on homogenised industrial product really is a good for all of us.

Now if you read books on whisky they tend to describe it as an acquired taste, and say that people should start with bland highland whiskies. Which might be good advice for someone who had never tasted whisky but for some reason wanted to get into it (because their friend never shut up about it, or because they like the image of it, perhaps?), but for most normal people it isn’t going to work because it doesn’t show them why whisky can be such a wonderful drink. Laphroaig isn’t to everyone’s taste, but many people will drink it and say “wow” and then be inspired to try other whiskies. Appreciation of more subtle flavours takes longer.

It hadn’t occurred to me before that the same might apply to beer. A large part of the appeal of beer is that it is refreshing in a way that few other drinks are, and I think that is reason enough for most people to start drinking beer. For such people something relatively bland may be a good place to start.

Of course, many such people never become interested in the more challenging beer styles, perhaps sticking to some god awful mass-market lager. So there is still a need for something to shock them into taking the next step into exploring all that beer can offer.

For them, and for people who have never seen the appeal of beer as a refreshing drink (it amazes me that there are people who think wine is an appropriate drink for a hot sunny day, but there are), I agree with you – you won’t get them interested in beer by offering them something easy drinking.

Fencesitter.

Re: US beer — you presumably first tried a US IPA after a good few years of drinking and appreciating cask ale. For many people (including us) they (IPAs specifically) can be revelatory, exposing the raw flavour and aroma of hops in a hard-to-miss way. Yes, once you’ve got used to them, the sheen can disappear, but that first taste can be a real eye-opener.

I don’t think we’re suggesting *really* challenging or “hairy” beers — just beers whose flavours aren’t delicate. Unchallenging, in fact.

Love the “bitterness hump”. Why should anyone force themselves over it when they can just drink sweet ciders? (See Tandleman above.) The best way has to be to a convincing presentation of the benefits of joining us ON THE OTHER SIDE… [theremin]

I realise that this all sounds horrendously macho and outdated, and totally irrelevant to the question of encouraging more women to give beer a go. I don’t think it’s entirely irrelevant, though. The old approach to initiating young men in beer – “shut up and sup up, you’ll like it when you’re older” – wouldn’t work on most (if any) women; these days it wouldn’t work on most men either. But it did work – it was a way to get new drinkers over the hump of an initially offputting flavour. That’s still the problem new beer drinkers face – it just doesn’t taste very nice, so they need incentives to stick at it. This is what I think Greene King have got right – that TV ad makes a pub look like a great place to be, *and* a place where people drink pints of beer. (Imagine a TV ad showing a woman drinking a pint of bitter. You’ll have to imagine it – I don’t suppose we’ll ever see one – but what a powerful statement that would make.)

The key is finding ways to push & pull people over the bitterness hump, not planing the hump away and ending up with something almost but not quite entirely unlike beer.

Seriously (well, semi-seriously). Among young males, it used to be common knowledge that beer was bitter, and that the first few times you drank it you wouldn’t like it. But you kept at it, because you wanted to be a man and that was what men drank. It was the head-down, don’t-complain, serve-your-time apprenticeship mentality in a glass (as distinct from the Apprentice mentality, which is very different).

When Paul Gascoigne first started being a laughing stock instead of a national hero, I remember reading about some shock! horror! binge he’d been out on. He and his mates had been alternating bottles and shots – bottles of Two Dogs and shots of Archer’s. My teeth are cringing just typing it – they might as well have been getting drunk on liqueur chocolates. It seems as if, at some point (in the 80s?), young men stopped bothering to serve their time with pints of something awful-tasting so as to acquire the taste of beer, and the brewing industry started letting them.

I’d be very keen on more women – and more men, come to that – discovering decent beer. But the word is ‘decent’. And decent beer is almost invariably bitter, and hence an acquired taste.

A few points.

First and small point, while the wine blogs and press is a bit more unified then beer it is not without it’s spats, its “anything but Chardonnay” ABC club, Merlot is dull comments etc

Now my big beef with your statement. The beer market as a whole is declining, but the craft beer and real ale markets are increasing. People are getting bored of bland (mass produced, sometimes) beer and are moving to drinks with more flavour. Some are moving to wine some are moving to spirits and cider and some are moving to more flavourful beer, Some may even pick and chose depending on what is available.

I don’t see the market as a whole as indicative of the ability of small brewery to be able to sell their beers. Those brewing good beers will continue to grow and those messing up or producing bland beer may not.

Not all Micros produce good or interesting beer, and not all Macros produce dull insipid dishwater, this is not a big vs small or craft vs real ale thing it is Good beer (well made with some taste) vs Bad beer (porly made or formulated) thing.

In my mind it is up to all brewers to up their game or lose out.

One thing I do agree with you is the need to have a united front on the beer and food thing, and the beer is not the cause of all drinking problems thing, and the beer duty is excessive thing, these are things we can unite behind.

I can’t bring myself to unit behind that all beer is great and all beer needs to be respected, cause it isn’t and and I don’t.

B&B have said that they have wine friends that have had Damascan insight into the delights of beer by the simple expedient of drinking it in America. My experience of drinking in the US is that there is as much cack as good stuff there too.

I doubt the route to truth will be found through the short Sharp shock of starting with challenging beers. Bit too much like cold turkey in reverse.