How I became a craft beer kind of girl...

There are a lot of times when I wish I could wear a shirt that says: "Yes, I like beer. No, not because my boyfriend does."  There are many reasons, I'm sure, why people assume that I like beer because of my boyfriend. He's active in this beer community, he's part owner of a brewery, he's collected more rare beers than we can physically store in our house...these are are legitimate truths that I love and respect about him and his love of beer.

But that's not why I love it.  In fact, I loved beer long before I met him.  I won't pretend that I knew what I was doing when I fell in love with beer, nor will I downplay the profound impact his passion and knowledge for craft beer has had on me. But I want to insist, as I'm sure many "craft beer kind of girls" do, that this love is truly my own. We should start a club, like this one but for women craft beer fans, not professionals.

Here's my love story:

I was living in Tampa, Florida. This was, as most of the country was in 2003-2004, a craft beer wasteland that was just starting to sprout the seedlings of what would become, country-wide, a fertile and prolific field of beautiful and unique brewery flowers. Check out this infographic showing how dramatically this movement would grow and bloom over the next ten years.  But not yet.

We were college kids, so we drank what was cheap and available.  We were drinking Bass, Newcastle, Guinness, thinking they were the elite, the pretentious beers. For big parties, we bought cases of Yuengling (it was Tampa, after all; Yuengling had a major factory less than a mile from my university). We were also living in the shadow of Busch Gardens, and Anheiser Busch was still king, everywhere.

I would like to say that my beer journey began with a special moment of awareness, and recognition of the "crap" from the "craft." But I would be lying. I drank what people bought me, what I could afford, and where my friends were. I had visited some local micro/nano breweries that were popping up at the time: New World Brewery in Ybor City is one that comes to mind.

I can attribute my love of craft beer to two things: those few friends with sophisticated palates from study abroad semesters and Yeoman's Road Pub in Tampa Fl. This bar had 20 taps of German, British, or Belgian beers and was my introduction to the finer world of beer styles. I realized, like the literature degree I was pursuing, beer had a complexity, depth, and this would guide passions for decades to come. My friends studied abroad in Spain, in Germany, and in England and wanted a place that had the old world feel and those good flavorful beers they were exposed to while away. Yeoman's met our needs and then some.

I can't tell you which beers Yeoman's introduced me to; it's too long ago and I was often drunk. But those humid nights on the patio of Yeoman's drinking pitchers of dark, roasty beers, or tasty Belgian blondes established a baseline for my palate. I can tell you that we could walk across the street and buy a six pack of Spaten Optimator or "big" bottles of Delirium Tremens.  This exposure and accessibility made all the difference in what would become my love and obsession for craft beer.

Fast forward--Christmas, 2004: My father, who felt my education was lacking due to my love of beer and my lack of knowledge of wine, spent the holiday plying me with bottles of red wine, but when I brought out the Delirium Noel to share my passion with him, he stated, "Oh no thanks. I'll stick to the good stuff." I was miffed. Why was the same language, the same tasting notes, somehow lesser when applied to my alcohol of choice? Was beer not legitimate? The snub bothered me and pushed me farther into that budding craft beer scene. I picked up "local" beers, something I remember is Ybor Gold or my first pint of stout from New World Bewery.

As a newbie, I didn't have the language or knowledge of our budding beer culture. But, I was about to move to SAN DIEGO. I didn't know that this foundation, created largely by accident and circumstance, would soon be expanded and honed and--forgive my pun--CRAFTED by the beer scene I was walking into. I was lucky--I magically picked the city that would grow to become America's craft beer capital.

9 months later, August 2005:  The first craft beer I bought myself, lonely and in culture shock, was a Stone IPA from Olive Tree Marketplace in Ocean Beach. I followed that up with a Lagunitas something (IPA?). I was so impressed with these flavorful IPAs and their emphasis on locally brewed, I wrote emails to my friends back home about the amazing beer I was drinking.  A year later, I started dating my boyfriend, who is now the ultimate "beer geek", but who at the time tended to opt more for PBR and tequila. I drank a lot of Ballast Point Yellowtail.

I understand that it's easy for people to assume that, because of his passion, I was pressured to create a tolerance of beer. But it's really the opposite. His love of beer, when it came, validated what I had already known for a long time: I'm a craft beer kind of girl.