I’m going to venture a wild guess here: At least 50% of Americans do not like beer, and of those who do drink beer, I’d feel overly optimistic if I tried to say that even 25% drink good beer. Everyone else is most likely buying Schmuck Lite by the 30-pack and chilling it to 14 Kelvin.

And so we must now beg the question: Why don’t more people in America like good beer?

I have a theory.

The problem begins with the soft drink industry. As soon as they’ve moved from crib to bed, children are jumping into the jittery world of juice, where fruit is combined with tankers full of high-fructose corn syrup until such a dilution is reached that we can no longer call it juice and must begin to call it a juice drink. From there, it is but a small step to sodas. If they have any teeth left at the end of this, they chow down on a big chocolate cake, and wash it down with a bag of Skittles.

When they hit the bars as adults, the trend continues. Look at the most popular alcoholic drinks: Cosmopolitans; Mojitos; Baileys; Long Island Iced Tee; Sex on the Beach. How often do you see someone order a well-aged Scotch anymore? Gods forbid you actually have to taste the liquor!

People in America do not like good beer because they were raised drinking soda. They’ve been trained to think that “tastes good” is equivalent to “sweet,” but good beer isn’t sweet — good beer is bitter*. And so, bar patrons saddle up to the heavily chilled light lagers, which don’t taste as much like beer as beer does, allowing them to reap the social benefits of drinking beer without having to taste it.

So, how can we raise good beer drinkers?

You shouldn’t be giving your kids soda, for one thing, even if you aren’t aiming to rear a respectable beer snob. Even juice should be a treat at best. Give them water, or milk if they can handle it. Steer them away from overly sweet snacks. Try giving them a couple pieces of 75% cacao dark chocolate. You don’t have to load their sippy cups with black Kona dark roast, but the sooner you can quash your child’s “bitter is bad” mentality, the sooner you can put them on the road to good beer. When they’re grown up, I mean. Wink wink.

*Ahem, usually.

Sadly, I was that little girl in the picture growing up. I got to drink all the soda I wanted — amazingly, I didn’t get my first cavity until I was 14 — and I didn’t learn to appreciate coffee until I was 22. Even then, it had to be flavored, loaded with flavored creamer, and topped off with sugar. Luckily I’ve gotten a lot better. I rarely drink soda, and when I do, I’m usually 3 sips in when I realize “Hey, this hurts my soul!” I tend to drink more robust coffee, but now with plain half-and-half and some splenda. There is hope for me.

But the type of alcohol-consuming person Ray described was also me in my early 20s. My college years saw me living off Mudslides, Malibu and Coke, and C&S Saloon’s famed “Grapeful Dead” (essentially a Long Island Ice Tea, but with grape schnapps and a splash of Sprite). I drank Molson if it was on special, or Labatts, mainly because we were that close to Canada. God did I have so much to learn.

But it’s been 6 years, and it’s been almost a year and a half of good beer drinking for me. I’ve learned to open myself up to trying anything, whether it be sweet, spicy, bitter, or just plain freaky.

So put down the high-fructose corn syrup, and eat something fresh from the local market and drink a homebrew, or at least a craftbeer!

Isn’t it funny how testimonials like that sound like they’re coming from a support group? “My name is Barry Lopeburgh, and I am a crappy beer drinker. It has been five years since my last crappy beer. I had a 750ml bottle of Weyerbacher Merry Monks right before I drove down here today, and it was wonderful.”

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