I dislike beer and I only mildly dislike bitter and cilantro. The only beer I will gladly drink more than a few sips of is Guinness. I enjoyed a Peroni the one time I had it but that may have been because I had walked 70 miles in the past 3 days and I appreciated the calories.
The vast majority of craft beers I don’t even like sipping one or two sips from. Some of them I enjoy having a whole shot glass of but it is the rare one that I am tempted to drink a whole regular glass of. And lite beers remind me of the athletic fields at the college I grew up next to which had drinking fountains that, after a weekend, sometimes smelled of stale beer that someone poured in the previous night.
It’s perfectly normal not to like the taste of beer. It’s basically boiled rotten grain with a bitter drug inside it.
Anyone can learn to like it. You just have to push through and repeatedly endure the unpleasant taste until the drug retrains your brain to associate that taste with a sense of relaxation, reward, and euphoria. Then you’ll have permanently acquired the taste for drugged rotten grain, and you will believe it was entirely on the merits of the flavor alone.
A friend of mine is an alcoholic. His dad was also an alcoholic and died when my friend was 10 of a vitamin deficiency situation. So my friend takes a handful of various vitamins every day. He’s an otherwise healthy alcoholic.
When I was in my twenties, I was assured by various people that the reason I didn’t like beer was because I had only tasted American beer, world-famous for being crap-water. If I could only get to Germany and taste real German beer, I’d soon change my opinion, they said. German beer is world-famous for being precision crafted, finely made, and by German law, must hold up to the strictest standards of quality. I would naturally fall in love with real German beer if I could drink it in Germany.
Well, I finally did make a trip to Germany, and my German hosts and I went to a popular beer hall. At last, I could quaff this mythical elixir that was real German beer. So I did…
…Annnnnnd it tasted like American beer. I did not like it.
I kept drinking it, because we were at a beer hall after all, and my hosts kept ordering.
I got really, really drunk. My hosts were amused by my naivete about beer.
And, yet, here I am liking beer from the first sip when I was five to now purposely buying non-alcoholic beers just for the taste of them. Yes, some people actually like the taste of beer.
It took me a while to develop a taste for beer, up into my late 20s; and even then, it was for lagers, dark lagers, porters and stouts. Some ales are pretty good, too. Most pilsners, wheat beers, and IPAs are right out.
I have a nephew who, at that age, would linger around the dining table after a dinner party so he could drink whatever coffee people hadn’t finished, right from their cups. Heck, if some people love the taste of durian, anything goes. I had a candy that was said to be durian flavored. It reminded me of sour milk with caramelized onions.
The first beers I really enjoyed were Lowenbrau, Heineken, and Augsburger. Once upon a time you could get a six pack of bottled Augies for $2 on sale. Good times!
Preparation can help some things, but for others the chemical makeup of the flavors involved simply can’t be changed by the cooking mode. Nasty Brussells sprouts will still have that awful taste regardless of the preparation. So will sweet potatoes and cilantro.
I think it’s generally that women don’t have the same social pressure to conform to gender stereotypes w.r.t. alcoholic drinks that men do, especially when they’re younger. I mean, if a woman wants sweet wine like a Moscato, white wine, red wine, white zinfandel, rum & coke, some fruity drink like a Mai Tai, or something like a Lemon Drop, nobody thinks anything of it.
But there’s definitely an expectation that men will drink beer, or some kind of straight spirit. Whiskey and coke is ok, but rum and coke is a bit effete, at least in the crowd I grew up in.
So women don’t have nearly the pressure to acquire a taste for beer, and even when they do, they don’t get teased if they drink hefeweizens or fruit beers like men might .
Eighteen years ago, my mom and I went on a cruise, and one of the excursions we booked was supposed to involve wine tasting. Well, we got one small taste of wine, then they hauled us to a place for a beer tasting. My mom loves beer, and I decided I’d give it a go. There were 5 different beers, and before pouring the samples, the guide talked about each one in turn.
I tried - I really did. But honestly, they all tasted equally nasty.
When I was a new kid in the Navy (almost 50 years ago), one of our training classes wrapped up with a kegger, and someone kept refilling my glass, and like an idiot, I kept drinking the stuff, even tho it was nasty. Closest I ever came to being drunk. Ick.
Visiting Colorado a couple of times, I was taken to the Coors Brewery for their tour, which ended in a tasting room. Again, I gave it a shot. Nope.