‘Boring’ beers and you

When you walk in to any bar, restaurant, bar-restaurant, restaurant-bar, gastro-bar or establishment you can find yourself a craft beer. Ofcourse the selection varies in‘craftiness’ everywhere. With ‘craftiness’ I mean how unusual the beer is. Nowadays brewers like to experiment with styles, additions, barrel-aging, yeast, hops and what have you. It is becoming more and more common that you come across a coffee caramel toffee milk-stout, a smoked peach beer or fruity dry-hopped sour when you go out drinking or eating with your friends.
I’m all for it. In fact, I have found that the weirder the beer the better I like it. Most of the times, at least. Some things are just not meant to be, even in beer. As the flavours keep getting weirder in beer land so do the tastes of the consumers get weirder and weirder. Or, more politely, their tastes develop and change. And of course people start to develop preferences. They might go for IPA’s for a long time and then switch over to drinking stouts. Perhaps they acquire a taste for sour beers or for raw ales.
However, people do often start to shun certain types of beers as well. In my circles I have found that most people start their journey into the magical land of craft beer™ with Belgian beers. You know, the stronger pale ales like Duvel or Leffe your parents or maybe some friends used to drink. Or that one uncle that maybe should switch over to something lighter. Anyhow, these beers are usually the ones that people start with, at least in my experience. Belgian strong ales, dark or pale, have historically been popular with craft beer enthusiasts. However, I found that most people tend to rarely consume Belgian craft beer once they discover the more weird stuff. Why would you drink boring Gouden Carolus Classic if you can have a blueberry wine barrel aged sour ale? Personally I would go for the latter in a heartbeat but I think a lot of people are missing out on the former.
For a long time I have not had a single Belgian beer. Mostly I drank stouts, IPA’s and sours when I really got into craft beer like most of my friends did. A little while ago I revisited these old, ‘boring’ beers and I rediscovered them in enhanced detail. And it was good. Much better than I remembered. Although these Belgian beers do not seem exotic they are exotic in a way: without any additions besides the usual grains, water, hop and yeast they are wonderfully complex beers. Gouden Carolus Classic (strong Belgian dark ale) invokes tones of dark dried fruits like plums, spices, caramel, red wine, roastiness and a lot of things I probably forgot. Or Dulle Teve (Belgian tripel) which has strong notes of grapefruit, hops and cloves. Although I liked them before I now appreciate them a lot more. There are many, so many beers that do not even come close to Dulle Teve or Gouden Carolus Classic in my opinion.
Now of course your experience may differ. People their palates are always different. Many times I have experienced that a flavour in a beer was very intense for me but not for someone else. And I am not saying you should drink your classics every week. But if sometime in the future you do not have any new or exciting beers to try give one of the oldies a try.
You might just find you still like ‘boring’ beers.