The "black and tan" or how I learned to stop caring and love dark beers

Like alot of people I never liked dark beers, always saying "i dont want to chew my beer!". The problem is that, like many americans, I am not the biggest fan of bitter beers or those that have a heavy coffee taste. I am not a coffee drinker as it is, so why would I want my beer to taste like it? Mainly I got brain washed (like many have) that bud heavy and pbr are beer... I am sorry, but they are to beer what Dr. Dre is to punk rock... The beers I guzzled in college only deserve the name of beer as they will get you get you drunk if you drink a absolute gigantic ammount of it.
As time went on living in KC I got more interested in craft beers, the Boulevard brewery was right down the street and I got heavily into their wheat beer. Then I dicovered a couple of liqour stores that had beers I had only heard in whispers as I passed bars on the weekends. All of a sudden I was randomly buying beers off the shelf and finding some amazing stuff and some really bad stuff posing in a fancy expensive bottle. But there were still few dark beers that struck my fancy. I tried porters, stouts, oatmeal stouts, chocolate stouts and porters. Then I thought back to a drink named the "black and tan", you may have heard of it...


So I started mixing the dark and the not, and I had a light bulb moment! Its not that I dont like dark beers, its just that im not thier target market. Micro brews focus on their niche', and go to an extreme to do so. So all these beers are a little over the top. And their niche is those that like things that I am not so into... So I started mixing the dark and the light beers. All of a sudden there was a flavor explosion in my mouth. And as time went on I started drinking dark beers on their own... I had found the ones that I did like and started drinking them and using the stronger ones for the black and tan. But instead of just saying I dont like it, I tried more and experemented some more and did find stuff I liked, and in the long run found some amazing stuff that I would I never would have thought about if I did keep an open mind.
Long story short, just because you dont like something doesnt mean you "dont like it". Try more, expand your pallet, keep going, you may just find something you love.

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