by Cate Kulak

Created on: December 11, 2009   Last Updated: December 12, 2009

Most agree that snobs of all stripes are not born but made.  The moment of my making as a beer snob was dinner on the Wednesday of Thanksgiving weekend, 1989.  That first night home from my freshman year of college, my parents served me a beer with dinner – a Sam Adams Boston Lager.

Their idea was that if I was introduced to drinking as something to do for flavor and enjoyment, I would be less likely to funnel and do keg stands. It worked; on that day a beer snob was born.

It’s tough being a beer snob in college, with the swill that passes for beer at parties.  It was worse back in the early nineties, when even Sam Adams was hard to find.  However, before I graduated and moved home, a very happy thing had come to my hometown: Hartford Connecticut got its own brew pub. The bartenders at the Hartford Brewery would pull the tap for Preying Mantis Porter as soon as I descended the tiled steps into the bar. 

Even going alone, I was always comfortable in there.  Whether I was treated like one of the guys because I was drinking a beer drinker’s beer, or because said beer was named after an insect that eats her mate remains a mystery.  But I was comfortable, a part of the community, not the center of attention.

Being a beer snob doesn’t really jive with the princess on a pedestal role.  It was great in those days at the Hartford Brewery, when my beer snob boyfriend was attending grad school two hours away; I was able to go out and just hang out with people who shared my taste in beer. 

Even when I was single and looking, being a beer snob made it more likely that I would be treated like one of the guys, which is a great way to get insight into a potential mate.  I was hanging out drinking Guinness when I met my future husband; when he invited me to his parents’ house to try his father’s home brew, I knew I had found the one.

This is not to say that beer snobbery is without its challenges.  I am truly pained by drinking bad beer; it’s not a point of pride, it’s simple digestive intolerance.  At sporting events, the swill costs eight dollars and the good stuff, when available, costs more, so attending them means going broke or going sober. 

There are social events where there truly are no good beers served, and it takes effort to avoid hurting the feelings of friends and family whose only flaw is poor taste in beer.  Then there is the constant rearrangement of glasses on the table at a bar – to many servers it is truly inconceivable that the darkest beer would belong to a female.

If you stop me as I sip my barley wine or savor my porter and you ask me about the downsides of being a beer snob, chances are I won’t admit any of that.  The wisdom of the serenity prayer carries over to all walks of life: in order to accept what I cannot change, the fact that I am a beer snob, I need to focus on the positives: the conversations it has started, the friendships it has sealed, and the way that it makes it easier to know myself and others.

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