Meister Bräu Bock
(Chicago) As a child growing up in 1970s Wisconsin, Meister Bräu Bock was the first beer I ever saw that wasn’t yellow. It tasted a bit different, too. My father told me they make bock beers every spring because that’s when the breweries clean out the bottoms of their tanks. Ha! This beer probably placed in my brain the idea that there are other beers in the world. The seasonal aspect—and the fact that my father bought several cases and stored them in the basement, which he didn’t do for any other beer—made me understand that this beer was special. The fact that it was my father’s favorite beer also probably influenced me because as the first-born child, I was definitely a daddy’s girl.
Hires Homemade Root Beer
(Utah/Home)
I know root beer isn’t a real beer, but hear me out: My family made a batch of this when I was 14. You mixed the concentrate up with sugar and bottled it with yeast, so it had natural carbonation from actual fermentation. It was dry and medicinal and tasted nothing like store-bought root beer. We bottled it in cleaned, saved beer bottles, just like homebrew, with a lever-action capper. It was so bitter that we could only drink it with vanilla ice cream as root-beer floats, and it seemed really weird to us sugar-addicted kids. I believe this experience caused me to understand that if you ferment and bottle something yourself, it can taste completely different from any commercial example.
Anchor Steam
(San Francisco)
At age 21, I was on a 3,000-mile road trip with a college girlfriend, driving from Arizona, up the West Coast, and across to Wisconsin. We were ahead of our time in that we always asked for and drank whichever beer was brewed locally—a habit we picked up attending university in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, home of Walter’s Beer and Leinenkugel’s (in nearby Chippewa Falls). When we got to San Francisco, the local beer was Anchor Steam. It had the most intense flavor of any beer that I’d tasted up until then—I remember thinking that it tasted like coffee. Of course, I don’t think that now, but if all you’d ever had were yellow beers, in comparison, there was definitely some roast flavor in the 1981 version of Anchor Steam. Note: I had tried Guinness Stout in college—but we didn’t consider Guinness a beer back then. We considered it a cocktail mixer, and periodically we drank “Guinness Sour,” a cocktail made of Guinness and sour mix.