The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

When I was in college, we had maybe 10 beer types available, and several were cheaper versions of the main one, like RW&B and PBR.

They all tasted pretty much the same, and "Coors" was this extremely rare magical stuff that I thought was favored by folks who don't like beer taste.  We also had Stroh, which was "fire brewed".  No one every explained to me why that was some kind of a thing.  There were a couple of German beers in some stores here and there, St, Pauli Girl I recall, and Heineken, but we couldn't afford them.  One bar downtown had Schlitz Dark on tap and I really liked that stuff.  Miller Lite was off in the future.

Bud, Miller, Schlitz, PBR, Stroh, and derivatives.  That was basically IT.  

Compare that with today, it's pretty amazing.  I have to credit Sam Adams in part for this revolution.  Europeans used to scoff at US beers for obvious reason.

I was in Seattle in 1988 (or so) at a conference and chanced upon this thing called a "brew pub".  It was fascinating, they made their own beer on site, and had great salmon sandwiches.  What a concept.  They had DIFFERENT beers that really tasted GOOD and not like horse piss in the rain.

yup, back in college I drank the St, Pauli Girl and Heineken, when someone else was buying

preferred the Grolsch in the flip top bottle when available

life is good, until your football team only wins 4 games in a season

not even during the Ickey shuffle daze

Heineken draft is ok.  But the green bottles do it no favors.  The beer goes bad due to light-strike which sets off a chemical reaction starting with riboflavin and ending with a skunky smelling/tasting compound called 3-MBT,  I'm sure CincyDawg could explain it way better than I can.

Clear and green bottles are bad, brown bottles are a little better, but cans are the only individual-sized transport vessel that are impervious to light-strike and they're also better sealed against oxidation.

Anyway, like I said before the draft version doesn't get that skunky taste, but it's still not a great beer.  It's always surprised me that a mediocre beer from the Netherlands became much more popular in the US than a bunch of really fantastic beers from Holland's neighbor, Belgium-- but such is the power of marketing.

 

I'm with you, I won't drink it either.

To be clear, France is similar to Spain and Italy regarding beer, but is really nothing at all like Germany, Belgium, Czech Republic, or the UK.  Way more options for beer in those latter countries.

Even so, outside of a couple of large cities in Belgium, the local bars tend to carry the local beers.  So you still might only see 3-4 taps at a Belgian beer bar.  One could be a major national pilsner/lager like Maes, Jupluer, or Stella Artois.  The other three taps are likely to be all from the local monastery, so there might be a golden ale, a brown ale, and a dubbel or trippel ale, all from the same local/regional brewery.  Most of those local ales are bottled, and bottle-conditioned, and served to you in the exactly appropriate glass.