What will you have (to drink)?

[Smellincoffee]

Raised in a teetotaling household, I was slow to take to alcohol. I enjoy wine at dinner parties, and beer during summer festivities, but otherwise stick to water, tea, and coffee. Recently I've poked around whiskey, and discovered a liking for scotch and brandy. I'm largely drawn to beverages that have some sense of "appropriateness"; hence the beer at a summer BBQ, the wine at table, or a bit of brandy after supper. I'd like to try something local like peach brandy, and investigate 'ale', but haven't found any quite yet.


What beverages do you enjoy and when? (Feel free to chat about coffee and tea -- they're just as fun.)

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I drink Arizona Iced Tea...a canned product that is more like vaguely tea flavored soda pop...pretty heavily in the heat. And I drink water.

I drink single malt scotch sometimes. I get a fifth and put it in the freezer and it lasts three months or so, and might go a year or more before I get another. I also might have a beer (singular) in the later evening. Sometimes a few days in a row, sometimes not for weeks.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Whatever it is that's new and I haven't tried yet.

 

[bhsup]

My favorite booze drinks are whiskey sours, rum and coke, and brandy. That said, I don't drink very often at all, and the few times I do it is usually just one tumbler, maaaaaaaaaaayybe two. My go to drinks are coffee, coca-cola, milk, and water, but not at the same time.

 

[JollyRoger]

Birther Tears - 2009 Vintage

 

[mangxema]

Mostly craft beers (ales, stouts), scotch, stuff with rum in it. I'll have a margarita if I can get a good one.

 

[Rashiminos]

Red wine and au jus (beef).

 

[T C]

I don't drink alcohol, and I don't really like fizzy drinks, so I mostly stick with coffee and fruit juice. My favourites are pineapple, passion fruit and graviola (I'm not sure if there is a word in English for this).

When I lived in the UK I drank a lot of tea with milk, but the milk is different here and the taste is not the same, so if I drink tea I usually drink a flavoured one.

 

[sophie]

Beer is incredibly rewarding if you take the time to get into it.

I'm a huge fan of pale/amber ales, so that's mostly what I drink. The trick with beers is to find what you like. You have to experiment a lot. The biggest sticking point is knowing what words mean, so here's some basics:

ale - tends to be fairly light in color, with fruity flavors. Tend to use lots of hops. This is my preferred type of beer, but it comes in a ton of varieties. A good entry ale would be something like a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Sam Adams. If you can find it Anchor Steam is more Amber than Pale and is really unique in its own right (it's brewed using steam), but it's a San Francisco classic and one of my all-time favorite beers. India Pale Ales are fermented with a lot of hops (the style developed using longer-fermentation methods developing the ale on long sea voyages between Britain and India). IPAs are VERY trendy right now, but you gotta be careful, a lot of IPAs substitute in-your-face- hoppyness (the citrusy/bitter flavor in a PA/IPA) for any kind of complex flavor. Some examples of ales include:

Pale Ale
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Anchor Liberty Ale
Samuel Adams Pale Ale
Dale's Pale Ale

India Pale Ale
Lagunitas IPA
Indiga IPA
Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra¹ IPA
California Breweries Racer 5 IPA*

Brown Ale
Newcastle Brown

Blonde Ale
Duvel

Lager - a type of beer originating in Germany. The name is a reference to how the beer is fermented - in a cellar-type location at low temperature. The sad fact is that these days in America Lager is almost universally associated with crappy American generic beers. Budweiser and Coors are both "American Lagers". It's sad because there is a ton of variety in Lagers. They don't have to taste like watered-down piss. The better ones are crisp and very flavorful. Pilsener is a type of Lager that I recommend quite highly. Most Cervezas Mexicanas (Corona, Modelo Especial, Pacifico, Negra Modelo, etc.) are also Lagers. Some examples of Lagers:

American Lager
Yuenling
Budweiser
Coors

European-Style Pilsener
Amstel
Stella Artois

Dark Lager
Samuel Adams Boston Lager
Yuengling Traditional Lager

Stout: Stouts are made with a malt, and tend to have a malty flavor. Hard to describe what it tastes like, but just have a few, compare with an ale, and you'll immediately understand what a malty flavor is. Stouts also tend to be combined with chocolate/coffee notes. To me they're a bit more spirit-ey than other kinds of beers. I find they're a lot more mellow than ales and lagers. The most common stout you'll find is Guinness but there are other pretty good ones like Russian Imperial Stout. I've found that after IPA/PA Stouts tend to be the other really trendy American microbrew style.

¹Extra or Double denotes a much stronger hoppy flavor/bitterness to the beer
*In case you haven't noticed the IPA has sort of become the quintessential California
microbrew beer

So basically the trick to learning what type of beer you like is to find your preferences for a couple points:

light/dark (or wheaty/malty/hoppy):
The lightest beers tend to have a wheaty flavor. Belgian (or Belgian-style) witbiers are the quintessential wheaty beers. Examples include Shock Top, Blue Moon, and the like. Hefeweizen and blonde ales also have very wheaty flavors. From there you have lagers which can have wheaty-notes but a bit more of a sharpness to them. Then you have ales that can vary in darkness from Pale Ales to Amber Ales to Red Ales, generally speaking they're all going to have various degrees of hoppy flavor. Then you have your Brown Ales. Newcastle Brown and British Bitters are good example of darker Ales. Newcastle is decent, they tend to have a nice blend of hoppy and malty notes. Then you have your stouts and porters which are very dark, quite malty, and often are mixed with chocolate or coffee flavors.

Once you know the color then you narrow it down to the type you like. Once you know what you like picking out beers isn't that hard. As I said, I love hoppy flavor so I tend to stick to the IPA/PAs, but I also drink a lot of Amber, Red, and Dark Ales. I'll tolerate the wheatier side of things for a bit, but I get tired of them quickly. They're a bit too sweet for my taste. I used to love Stouts but I had a bad run-in with one once in college so now I don't like them quite as much.

tl;dr there is no one type of beer. Learn some of the more basic terminology and experiment. The beer picks the person, I find.

 

[Gori the Grey]

In honor of this thread, I've poured myself a scotch. (OK, I was going to anyway this evening)

I'll occasionally drink a beer. Wine with dinner once a week, I'd say. Nothing has the effect of warming me like brandy, so that's a wintertime drink only.

Coffee and orange juice every morning. Tea every afternoon. Water otherwise.

I haven't had many kinds of alcoholic beverage, but I'm discovering that every kind has a distinct effect on me. Wine makes me drowsy. Margaritas make me "feelin' no pain." Brandy warms me. If I ever had to "steel myself" for something (terrible news, say), I would drink a bourbon, because it seems to have that effect. Funny. One would think alcohol would just be alcohol. Maybe it's all in my head, but they all seem to have very distinct effects.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Water. Herbal tea, sometimes. I used to drink quite a bit of juice and lemonade, and coffee now and then.

These days mostly this nutritional drink thingy for medical reasons.

I used to occasionally drink alcohol here and there, but now (and pretty much for the rest of my life) I'll have to limit consumption for health reasons. Kinda sucks if I wanna go out or something, but at least my friends will always have a designated driver.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I don't drink alcohol or coffee. Water depends on the time of year; tap water in the spring is not that great.

Hot drinks: cocoa, the very occasional herbal tea if there's enough honey in it, sometimes beef or chicken broth.

Fruit juices: cranberry, grape, blueberry, or saskatoon berry. Clamato is an occasional indulgence in winter.

Dairy: milk, Yop (drinkable yogurt), flavored milk, nonalcoholic egg nog at Christmas/New Year's Eve

Pop: Dr Pepper, Dr. Rock, A&W Root Beer, Canada Dry Gingerale (the cranberry variety of this is really good), Mango, Mountain Dew, and occasionally others.


And sometimes I have an insane craving for snow, especially after a fresh dump of wet snow. It's hard to find a drift or snowbank that's uncontaminated, though.

 

[SoupJuice]

Coffee is breakfast. Tea time is water - one day I'll be into tea but that is in the future. Lunch time is water, and water continues throughout the rest of the day until bedtime. I am not one for pop or juice on a daily basis as water tastes better (to me) than anything a company makes.

Beer is so good. I do not enjoy other hard liquors much. Vodka doesn't like my digestive system, gin is drinkable but a silly idea, rye - an even sillier one. I haven't really found a beer I don't like when it comes to the types - there are a few local breweries that are reasonably-priced and decent-quality so I usually have the fridge stocked with stuff from around here. I also enjoy Budweiser and Bud Light but that is more of a sentimental thing - yes, I am sentimental about beer.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Nothing beats a good sip of whiskey. The good stuff is worth it and the buzz is without competition.

Beer is good for letting it slight into a very smooth mindset / sleep / causal occasions.
Vodka I only know from getting buzzed all the way. I don't think it lends itself to a bit of sips.
Same for other beverages from my experience.

Vine is good for long conversations / solitary meditative mindsets.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Mostly water, tea and too much pepsi.
Also more beer than I should - mostly pils, sometimes kölsch, rarely wheat beer-, sometimes red wine with lunch or dinner and occasionally a glass of whiskey, brandy or sljivovic.

 

[dusters]

Tea. Tea ceremonies are so HOT. <3

 

[Mise]

Alcohol-wise, I like light beers and gin and tonics. As for soft drinks, diet coke/coke zero/pepsi max/diet pepsi etc. Or just any fizzy drink without sugar really.

Also, yeah, tea.

 

[REDY]

I dont like strong drinks except vodka. I drink mostly normal tap water. Little coffee and beer.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Fairly consistent and usually like this:
A glass of juice/fruit-berry-drink early, before going to work.
Coffee to breakfast and afternoon break.
Tap water at lunch.
Low-pasteurized milk to evening meal.
Occasional glass of red wine in the weekends or beer in hot summer days.
I almost always have one or two glass bottles of Coca-Cola in the fridge too. Sugared with sugar.

I've never seen the point about tea.

 

[Traitorfish]

I mostly craft/regional beer, when I can get it, because I have a beard and a draw full of plaid shirts and sometimes it's easiest just to play into the stereotype. If I had to pick a particular variety I'd probably say IPAs are my favourite because I think they hit a nice balance between refreshing and flavourful, although a really good dark ale is something to be cherished. Recently I've been getting over my British ale snobbery and trying more largers, particularly American ones, and there's a lot of really good stuff there. As Owen says, there's really no such thing as beer, singular, and half the fun of being a craft nerd is that variety.

(edit: Also, I've just noticed, you can tell Owen is American because it doesn't occur to him to mention porters. )

Non-alcohol-wise I mostly drink tea or coffee. I have high enough standards that I avoid instant coffee, but not so much that I can actually tell you what I'm drinking beyond it being more or less strong, and perhaps having a picture of an elephant on the bag. (Always a strong selling point.) I used to drink a fair bit of soda, but that has played merry hell with my teeth (and probably didn't do the rest of me any good), so I'm trying to cut back.