Things are getting pretty hectic at work, so I’m going to have to postpone my ‘crystallopgraphy for dummies’ project for now. I’ll come back to it soon. For now, here’s that beer-related project I was talking about.

For my birthday, my friends Brantley and Sarah gave me a gift certificate to Wine Warehouse here in town. And at first I was conflicted. I do like wine, but I spend a lot of time alone and don’t live with big drinkers, so I don’t exactly go through the wine very fast. It even gets worse when the wines are especially expensive or of high quality, because I tend to save them for “special occasions”, which usually means “years from now”. I have a bottle of Chianti I brought back from Florence which will probably never be opened.

Perhaps noticing my hesitation over the gift of another bottle of wine I’d never open, Brantley made a point of telling me that they also had beer, which suddenly made their gift all the better. I do like beer, and unlike wine, I drink it regularly[1], because the smart people who make beer had the brilliant idea to put the stuff into single-serve containers.

The trouble is, despite the fact that I’ve claimed to be a beer snob, I am in reality a beer neophyte. Yes, while I do avoid the Buds, Miller Lites, and Pabst Blue Ribbons of the world, I find myself buying six-packs of the same few brands I’ve liked (Sam Adams, Corona, and Yuengling) over and over again. Furthermore, I don’t actually know anything about beer. I can’t tell a lager from a hole in the ground. And what the heck are “hops”, anyway?

Well, no more! It’s time for me to go out and explore the wider world. I went to Wine Warehouse and selected 11 bottles of beer and ale of all kinds from all over the world, and now I plan to drink each one and then write about them. So stay tuned, and watch the self-education of a beer connesieur in the making.

[1] At this point, I should note that there may be people out there, possibly related to me, who don’t know that I drink. So, um, I drink. Not a lot, mind you! But yes, John Wesley probably wouldn’t be happy with me. Sorry.