The publication of this article takes place at the height of drinking at Bowdoin, the Friday of Ivies. For a column that is rarely topical, I’m excited to be writing for an audience that might see my biweekly contributions as, for once, relevant.

Surely you have heard the adage “you are what you eat.” It is an adage because it is true. Today, Bowdoin students will define themselves on the basis of what they’ve decided to imbibe during this year’s festival of Lites. Since we all enjoy the anthropological game that is observing each other during Ivies, let this article serve as a handy resource.

What does your Ivies beer say about you?

Bud Light/Natural Light: You are boring. Your life is boring. You have made a predictable choice; as mainstream a beer as possible in the universe of cheap, watery lagers. You have made no effort to assert any sort of preference or style in your selection. You intend to play a lot of drinking games. Enjoy your naked lap.  

Miller Lite: Miller Lite’s nostalgic marketing—which revives its simplistic white cans with serif, navy text from the 1960’s—suggests that you want to resist your normcore identity. You are not aware of this enough to have purchased PBR, but you still felt some latent hesitation as you contemplated predictable Bud. This hesitation stems from the same place as the satisfaction that you had when you attached a carabineer to your Nalgene despite that fact that you have never been camping and probably never will.

Miller High Life: The champagne of industrial lager beer. It denotes some semblance of taste and consideration despite the drinkable equivalent to half-assing an essay in Times New Roman. (Some people use Cambria and those people are horrible.)

Rolling Rock: Cool bottles.

Bud Light Lime: You abhor the taste of alcohol and enjoy the taste of limeade because you are a child. It is unclear why you are at Ivies, or at Bowdoin at all. Objectively speaking, there is no possible way that you are over the age of twelve. Go find an adult to take you home.

Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR): You live in Reed House and/or are part of the Outing Club. You own a polaroid camera. You are so excited for the new Mumford album. (Real fans call them Mumford).

Molson: Why? So random. You are the person in your grade that everyone will be shocked to learn exists when your name is called at graduation.

Blue Moon/Shock Top: You’ve scorned the plebeian swillers of macrobrews from atop your high horse since you discovered a six pack of Shock Top in your parents garage refrigerator. You think this is craft which means you do not read my column which means you are horrible.Craft beer: You spend way too much money on Ivies and steal all your opinions from the New Yorker.

Forties: You appreciate the economy of this foul-tasting barf water, which means you have no respect for your body but respect for the cause. That you opted for it over the economy of a fruity mixed drink says volumes about your character.

Non-domestic cheap lagers: You’re not fooling anyone that you have good taste in beer because they come in glass bottles. The one exception is Stella, in which case you are classy and I’m intimidated by you. 

Human urine: See Bud/Natty.

Any beer in a beer helmet: Was it easy finding new housing after they shut down Crack?

Any beer in a camelback: Mike Woodruff is going to be very angry with you on Monday.

Have you seen the sex scene in “Blade Runner?” In the moments before Harrison Ford kisses his co-star Sean Young against a window pane, there are a series of close-up shots of Young’s face. The intimacy of the camera—the way it notices her soft cheeks, her strands of flyaway hair—humanizes her, induces a kind of empathy and attraction in the viewer that simulates Ford’s, and that hopefully overcomes the knowledge that she is an android. She is, in those moments, “human”, in the adjectival form.  

That’s good filmmaking. It makes you want to sleep with a robot, or, at the very least, confuses your understanding of what a robot is.

Sometimes, I have a similar confusion about what makes a craft beer “craft.” On Tuesday, it was National Beer Day, and I saw that Chicago’s Goose Island Brewery had posted a Forbes article titled “The 13 Best Craft Beers in America.” The 13 craft beers were chosen by Matt Canning (the beer concierge at Hotel Vermont) and among them is Goose Island’s Bourbon Country Stout. “‘The standard for all barrel aged stouts,’ Canning wrote. ‘Chocolate, caramel, and smoke on the nose—and rich oak from the barrels on the finish.’”

But does Bourbon County Stout deserve a place on Canning’s list? Based on his description of the flavor, it seems so. However, in March of 2011, the macro-brewing company Anheuser-Busch purchased Goose Island, and thus, by the definition put forth by the Brewer’s Association, which states that a craft brewery must be small and independent, Goose Island is technically no longer a craft brewery.

Can a non-craft brewery make craft beer? While it may be owned by the industrial brewers, Goose Island consistently produces delicious beer. Goose Island’s inclusion among the list makes the implicit argument that craft beer is about taste, and taste alone. 

Goose Island’s CEO and founder John Hall stands by that argument. “‘Goose Island is a craft beer, period,’” he stated to time magazine in an August of 2013 article that questioned the status of Goose Island’s craft identity. The article explains that smaller, independently owned craft breweries initiated the questioning because they saw Goose Island as a threat to the meaning of the word “craft”. 

“‘The so-called definition of craft beer has evolved over the years,’” Hall continued. ‘“Both the brewery size and ingredients have been changed. I believe the beer drinkers are the ones who truly decide what is a craft beer or isn’t.’”When time went to the Brewer’s Association for comment, Julia Herz, the Brewers Association’s craft beer program director, agreed with Hall, saying that the Brewer’s Association does not have a hard and fast definition for what craft beer is (unlike the outline it has for what a craft brewery is). Like Hall, she leaves it up to beer drinkers to make the decision.

I’m a beer drinker. But I hope you aren’t looking for an answer from me, because I don’t have one. Yes, I think a lot about what it means to be craft beer, and yes, taste is certainly something that I consider highly important—haven’t you noticed my comical propensity for hyper-specific flavor reviews? (Haven’t you made fun of them?)

But I’m also a romantic who likes to meet her brewer. I’ve been made fun of for that, too. This is part of my consideration when I think about that scene in “Blade Runner,” when I think about Bourbon Country Stout as a kind of android beer: ostensibly and empirically faithful to a certain definition, but still, lacking something essential and untraceable. 

I guess that would be the “human-ness” of the beer, which, I suppose, signifies that feeling of satisfaction you get from drinking something that was made nearby, made by hand, made by people that you can put a face to, that have a story.

And yes, “craft” is conflated often with “local,” and I know that is incorrect. I remember drinking Brooklyn Lager at a pub in London and thinking that it tasted delicious, even a thousand miles from where it came from. Stone Brewery is one my favorite breweries and it is located in Southern California, and they make 213,277 barrels of beer a year (for reference, that is nearly as much as the state of Maine produces annually).

And yes, I keep saying “and yes.” It’s the sound a person makes when she wants to be both a certain kind of consumer and a certain kind of connoisseur.

I stood before a big chalkboard on the wall opposite the foyer of the restaurant—the menu—like it was a great painting. My eyes descended the list, clinging to each item like a rung on a ladder; in reaching the bottom, the menu had become a stack of tough decisions. This menu had been cultivated to appeal to a diverse range of palates. Among the staples were surprises, more uncommon finds that suggested the restaurant’s desire to provide its patrons with novelty as well as quality. But despite the range and variety, the items on the menu were united in their commitment to a sense of place: the Portland beer scene.

The menu, or draught list, at Pai Men Miyake—where I found myself coming for dinner and drinks this past Friday—embodies Portland’s enthusiasm for craft beer in its selection of local Maine beers as well as international crafts from countries like Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and California (yes, I include California, whose brewing prowess makes it a kind of beer “country”). Portland is a beer drinker’s Epcot in its stylistic and geographic diversity, and Pai Men, though a Japanese restaurant, embraces the spirit of Portland’s diversity.

So yes, decisions, decisions. Luckily, I didn’t have to make many, as I brought along with me a troop of tasters: three other senior ladies who had consented to tackling the taps with me. We also had Ben with us, a sophomore and our designated driver, but also a self-described “serious eater.” You can read his column on page seven to see for yourself. While I stood slacked-jawed before the draught list, he stood with his nose in the air, commenting on how good the place smelled. The place smelled like yummy soup.

Besides the perfunctory addition of Sapporo (a cheap, ubiquitous Japanese lager), the tap list was clearly assembled with the interest of a beer drinker in mind. My advice to beer drinkers who are headed to Pai Men (and beer drinkers, you ought to be headed there) is to follow the implicit suggestion of the restaurant and choose the beer that seems most exciting to you. The conspicuously robust and thoughtful tap list suggests that Pai Men wants to honor its identity as a restaurant in Portland, Maine as much as a purveyor of delicious Japanese fare. The disjunction between Pai Men’s cuisine and its beer offerings (a tension encapsulated in the restaurant’s similarly unique moniker “Japanese pub”) should relieve restaurant patrons of the task in trying to discern “right answers” when it comes to pairing the food and drink.

That said, it isn’t a bad idea to keep in mind some of the principles of pairing beer and food.Usually, when we think of sophisticated food and alcohol pairings, we think of wine. But beer is an excellent companion with food, and its numerous styles means there are endless combinations to play a  round with. The most basic rule of thumb when pairing beer with food is matching strength with strength. If you order a subtly-spiced witbier and proceed to chow down on a bowl of spicy curry, the curry will surely overtake the delicate complexity of the beer. The same is true for the reverse: a strong and smoky rauchbier will cancel out the delicacy of sashimi. Order what you like—there is no right or wrong choice—but try not to create too much competition for your taste buds.

If you are concerned with creating a happy marriage between your food and your beer,  keep the following in mind: what do you want the effect of our pairing to entail, flavor wise? With beer, there are major “effect” categories when it comes to pairing: complementary (roasty stouts and savory meats); juxtaposition (a dry and cleansing pale ale with a fattier dish); and, for lack of a better word, the creation of a new flavor from the union of two distinct flavors (who knew that the combination of imperial stout and oysters resulted in a delicious in-between sensation?).Pai Men’s tap list encourages creativity, so run wild with it. I did. Our waitress came over and asked Margaret what she wanted to drink. I responded, “We’ll take a Bissell Brother’s Swish, a Bunker Bunkerator, a Liquid Riot Tripel, and, hmmm, okay let’s go with the Rauchbier.”Young Benjamin ordered a lemonade and scribbled something about mayo and scallops. For what would not be the first time that night, Emily noted that the music was good (a refrain that took the place of reviewing the food). “Stop asking me what my beer tastes like,” she said after we ordered a second round. “Eat your miso,” she said.

“Can I try your miso?” asked Ben.

“Oriana, can I try Margaret’s stout with your pork bun?” I asked Oriana.

Since our meal on Friday, the tap list has already rotated, and what delightful (and failed) combinations I discovered over the course of dinner—how the Rauchbier’s smoked malts overwhelmed the food, yet alone, tasted like a drinkable barbeque; how the sweetness in the Bunkerator Bock harmonized with the savory brussel sprouts—are not much help to you. While the tap list may constantly change, the commitment to excellent and interesting beer is consistent, making Pai Men Miyake as much a drinker’s paradise as a haven for Japanese comfort food. Everything is a safe bet, so my advice is to experiment.

The local bars in Brunswick each have something they’re good for. Joshua’s is a good place to end (or begin) a night out. Sea Dog is a good place to bring your folks and your roommates on Family Weekend. Ebenezer’s Brewpub, just about a mile from campus on Route One, is good for beer.

Ebenezer’s Brewpub is the home of Lively Brewing, a Maine brewery started by Chris Lively. Lively is also the owner of the original, world-famous Ebenezer’s Pub in Lovell, Maine. A neat piece of trivia: the original Ebenezer’s was rated “the best beer bar in the world” by veritable beer authorities such as Draft Magazine and BeerAdvocate (the latter awarded the title five years in a row). For a bar in middle of nowhere, Maine, that’s an accolade almost as surprising as it is impressive. 

The praise for the original Ebenezer’s is due to its incredible selection of beer. The pub boasts a whopping thirty-five taps dedicated to Belgian beers, but what has perhaps earned them their reputation is its impressive collection of cellared beers: Ebenezer’s houses over seven hundred bottles of aged beer, many of which are rare and highly coveted by beer connoisseurs. 

Yes, it might surprise you to learn that certain beers can be cellared. Not all beers take to aging (hoppy beers especially are best right after they are brewed, when the hops are still fresh and aromatic), but the ones that do often mature into boozier, complex versions of themselves. Beers that are suitable for cellaring—typically beers with heartier constitution and higher alcohol content, such as imperial stouts or barleywines—are of course ready to be enjoyed when they hit the market, but cellaring is a fun way for beer geeks to experiment with the different flavorful evolutions a beer can undergo over time.

Ebenezer’s Brewpub has a more narrow and specific selection: here in Brunswick, the pub only offers its own beer—beer brewed under the Lively name. The Brewpub usually has between eight and ten beers available, and the list grows and rotates over the course of time to showcase new brews. The changing selection means that a trip to Ebenezer’s is a chance to experience the brewer’s different experiments and refinements. And you can pretty much count on the fact that you’re drinking it fresh.

Lively Brewing (as I’ll refer to the brewing end of the operation) has a noticeable preference for Belgian beers, and they populate the menu, with fun names like “Brother Broseph” and “the Beaut.” I’m careful to generalize about my experience, given the changeable nature of the menu so there are bound to be hits and misses. I’ve preferred the brewery’s Belgian-inspired Saisons and Abbey Ales over its hoppier attempts. This is possibly with the exception of the Belgian Witbier, which underwhelmed. 

The pale ales and IPAs hadn’t quite found the right balance, and packed a citrus rind-y punch without much compliment from the malt. In all fairness, however, I prefer IPAs and pale ales that aim at a more tropical or dank hop profile.My favorite beers at Ebenezer’s so far have been the dark beers. I’ve sampled three so far (note: doing research for this column is more fun than doing research for my classes), each a different style, and in body, nose, flavor, and complexity, each had proven to be the best beer of the night. 

Now, it usually isn’t a good idea to group beers by their color, as color isn’t a trustworthy indication of flavor or style. But I’ll still venture this evaluation given that it’s remained true over a range of styles: I’ve had a Dubbel, a rye, and an American Porter that were each distinct in flavor, but united in their supremacy over the rest of the menu. If you’re planning to head over to the Brewpub soon, I recommend a glass of the Lively Rye, a smooth, medium-bodied beer with a boozy sweetness that conjures up notes of dried fruit, and ends with a dry, almost tart finish. 

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, but less than 24 hours after it was over several of my friends emailed me the link to a Budweiser commercial that aired during the game. The advertisement is a cocky and desperate attempt to take on the increasing popularity of craft beer, wherein Bud seeks to promote its own mediocre product by way of hurling childish, immature accusations at the craft beer industry. 

Edited to a song that I assume is called “Macho Song!”, the commercial alternates between shots of Bud Light and craft beer, while flashes of bold text help to draw a comparison between Bud drinkers and craft drinkers—which, in Bud’s evaluation, is the difference between true beer drinkers and pompous snobs. “Budweiser: it’s not brewed to be fussed over,” the ad proclaims. “It’s brewed for a crisp, smooth finish.”

Conspicuously absent from the commercial is a final shot of Budweiser’s top executives pointing at the camera and yelling, “You need some ice for that burn?”

Now, excuse me while I “fuss over” this advertisement.

What is most fascinating to me about this ad is that it identifies the culture of craft beer as a major threat to macro-brewed beer—not the beer itself. 

Notably, the ad mocks and demeans the kinds of ritual and behavior associated with drinking craft beer: smelling, sipping and discussing the flavor of the brew— what Budweiser terms the “dissecting” of a beer. 

Aggressively, but not perhaps not surprisingly, Budweiser points a finger at hipsters for starting all the fuss. The ad introduces craft beer with a shot of a guy with chunky glasses dipping his bushy moustache into a foamy stout. 

Because, as all know, hipsters are judgmental snobs who start pointless fads in order to make you feel bad about yourself. Hipsters, and therefore, craft beer drinkers, are the worst, and certainly nothing like the honest and unaffected folks who drink Bud. 

“The people who drink our beer are the people who like to drink beer,” says the ad. Those other losers are drinking the hipster Kool-Aid.

While the cheap finger-pointing and macho appeals to the (male) consumer’s ego are obnoxious and, frankly, a little bit sad, Budweiser (and other macro-breweries) is not entirely off-base. The Atlantic published an article last November that attempted to explain the popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) over Budweiser. PBR has an enormous appeal among hipsters, despite the fact that, like Bud, it is a cheap (and cheap-tasting) macro-brewed lager. 

The article goes on to quote a Quartz report that discovered the following: “After observing [PBR’s] unexpected popularity in Portland, Oregon” ”—hipster mecca—“back in 2001, the company concluded that people were buying the beer because it wasn’t aggressively being pitched to them.”

“For a brand as large as Budweiser,” The Atlantic article goes on, “not advertising at all probably won’t cut it as a strategy. But cynically pandering to Millennials…isn’t going to cut it, either.”

In the context of these findings, Budweiser’s claim that it is “proudly a macro-beer” is less of a rallying cry, and more of a defensive, embittered whine. But what other options do they have? What’s going to cut it?

Another way that macro-breweries have attempted to combat the rise of craft beer is not by advertising, but by infiltrating the craft beer market with actual beer. The two major examples of this phenomenon are Blue Moon and ShockTop. 

These beers are brewed by macro-breweries—MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch, respectively. The idea is to brew a different style of beer (Blue Moon and ShockTop are both wheat beers, not lagers) that is slightly higher quality, and market it like a craft beer. In this sense, Blue Moon and ShockTop are less like breweries and more like sub-brands of larger companies who are trying to appeal to diverse markets.

MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch have met relative success in convincing the lay consumer that their decoys are craft. For one, you can’t find any obvious sign of their parent corporations on the packaging. And, I have to admit, they do taste better—at least enough to notice a difference over a cheap, watery lager.

But their plan backfired. While the idea was to reclaim the market by introducing a better tasting beer, Blue Moon and ShockTop became gateway beers into the craft market. The difference consumers detected in the improved “crafty beers” (as Blue Moon and ShockTop are now called) led consumers to seek out real craft beer—which, unsurprisingly, tastes even better. It seems as though the people who like to drink beer—because they like the taste of beer—are drinking craft.

So while the process of dissecting craft beer is a little geeky and a little goofy—my friend recently noted that her Berliner Weisse had a pleasant “urine taste”—it’s ultimately in the effort of seeking a more challenging relationship with something we love and enjoy. 

To use a literary analogy, Budweiser’s logic that its beer’s euphemistic “crispness” is preferable because it lacks complexity and goes down easy is equivalent to condemning the stylistic experimentalism in Finnegan’s Wake in favor of the clarity of the prose in Twilight.

When I first saw Bud’s Super Bowl ad, I tweeted it with the caption: “This is the greatest commercial I have ever seen.” Perhaps it was to fight hyperbole with hyperbole, or mockery with more mockery. 

But mostly, it’s because in one infuriating minute the ad ironically defies itself by depicting the complex reality of beer in America today—the marketing, the production, the perceptions, the rivalries—proving that these days, in America, nobody, not even Budweiser, can help but to fuss over beer.

While I was home for Thanksgiving in New York last November, I met up with a couple of Bowdoin alums at a craft beer bar on West 45th Street. The place looked like a trendy cellar—slender, dimly lit, and a few steps down from the sidewalk outside. 

And perhaps cellar is the right word, because while the bar had a few taps, this was really a bottle shop. 

The real selection resided in a long wall of coolers containing an enormous array of bottles representing some of the finest beers available. Jostling between several groups of stylish, bearded people, I made way from the fridges and hunted for one of my favorite IPAs from the West Coast.  

Returning to our table—a varnished plank straddling two upturned oak barrels—I was surprised by my friend’s selection: an elegant, slender brown bottle, with a simple, unmistakable white label. She’d found Zoe, an amber ale from a small craft brewery, Maine Beer Company (MBC), located twenty minutes from Bowdoin’s campus in Freeport. 

The design of the bottle, clean and unassuming, suggested it might have been out of place among craft ales (it looked almost like a wine bottle). But that assessment was soon belied by the flavorful contents within. MBC wasn’t out of place—it was distinctive. 

It’s a brewery with the unassuming charm of a local business and the prowess to compete in the big leagues. I wasn’t surprised to find MBC among such a fine company of beers because their beer is excellent. I was simply surprised to find it so far from its home in Maine.

MBC is a real  “started-from-the-bottom” story. Begun as a hobby then founded in a garage, it eventually grew from nano-brewery to microbrewery to the brewery that produces beers so popular that it can’t meet its demand—good luck finding bottles of their IPA Lunch. 

As an indication of MBC’s success, prominent beer writer Joshua Bernstein uses its flagship brew, Peeper Ale, as a paradigmatic example of the American Pale Ale style in his bestselling coffee table book on beer tasting. Truly, their story is so quintessential and inspiring that you can find it on their website, presented in a digital chapter-book format. Read it to your kids—or someone’s kids.

But although MBC’s reputation began to extend well beyond mid-coast Maine with a demand to match it, it chose to stay small. When I asked an employee about expansion over a beer last October, she implied that the owners were happy with what they’d built. They didn’t feel the need to expand.    

What MBC does feel the need to do is the right thing—this doesn’t just mean drinking beer. “Do what’s right” is the brewery’s slogan, or more aptly put, the brewery’s mission statement. One percent of their gross sales are donated to environmental non-profits and each beer contains a paragraph on its label describing the non-profit towards which its sales contribute. 

All craft beers wear a noticeably higher price tag than their mass-marketed compatriots, but at least with MBC you can feel like the few extra dollars are truly well spent.

Now, reader, do what’s right and drink MBC’s beers. 

I may be exposing a bias, but I think its hoppier offerings are where the brewery excels. As a general note, MBC beers are not assertively bitter—even those which showcase their hops at the front of the palate. I love MBC because I can rely on interesting, delicious hop profiles when I’m not in the mood for an astringent beer. I recommend MBC pale ales and IPAs to those of you who typically aren’t fond of IPAs or those who are interested in working their palate up to more daring, hoppier experiences.

In his book, Bernstein describes Peeper Ale as a “sunny” beer. Maybe this is a nod to its hazy, yellow appearance, but more likely it characterizes the effervescent, citrusy tang. Peeper Ale finishes dry, with lingering buttery-malt sweetness. Mo is an equally delicious, slightly hoppier, piney pale ale. I can’t decide which I like better.

Lunch is MBC’s most popular beer. Drinking it for the first time, I remember feeling surprised by the complexity of unexpected, even unconventional hop flavors that gave way to an almost graham cracker-y finish. The name is not a suggested replacement for the meal itself, although you have my permission.

Zoe is the outlier of my recommendations in that it’s an amber ale. However, as MBC has termed it a “hoppy amber”. Zoe is a great beer for those in the mood for malty, heartier and darker beer with some hoppy distinction.

You can try most of these and more down at the brewery in Freeport, and I suggest that you do. It’s totally unlike the bar in midtown—the place seems designed to resemble its beer labels, with clean, white, understated walls and an elegant bar to the side. You really do feel like you’re drinking the beer at its home. 

The famous English theorist Alan Sinfield determined that all hegemonic ideologies sow the seeds of their own undoing. Sinfield must have surmised this after attending many holiday parties. 

The holidays depend as much on their strict cultural traditions as they do on the annual mistakes that disrupt them—the dropped Thanksgiving turkey, the fallen-over Christmas tree. It’s built into the idea of the holiday that the holiday must go a little awry.

So allow to me continue in the time-honored tradition of reinforcing these cultural narratives, if only to ensure the survival of weird stories to share when it’s all over. Here are some beer pairings for the stereotypical characters that ought to be at your Thanksgiving celebration. Even this stupid narrative conceit is hopefully upended by the irony that hey, since when do we drink beer at Thanksgiving?

Your parents: I don’t care if your mother is a fun-loving progressive that let you have wine at dinner during your senior year in high school. When she’s standing over the turkey and wielding a large kitchen knife, you’ll be happy that you’re on your best behavior. That’s why you should pair your parents with a super low-ABV Lambic beer. Lambics are Belgian style, spontaneously fermented sour beers, meaning that the beer is fermented over a long period of time with specially cultivated “wild” yeast strains. 

Wild yeast—which begets the category of “wild beers”—imparts funky, unpredictable, but typically sour flavors, and yields a refreshingly tart and rarely boozy final product. What’s particular about Lambics, however, is the addition of fruit to the fermentation tanks, giving these full-bodied, smooth sipping beers an unmistakable fruit-juicy character. I recommend picking up a bottle of the Belgian Lindemans Framboise (2.5 percent ABV), if only because Lambics are uncommon, and I’ve seen this brand around my local Whole Foods. Try their option brewed with peaches.

The stately grandfather: The first time I got buzzed, my very own stately grandfather was over for dinner and I shook a lobster claw at him at the dinner table. His reprimand has left serious emotional scars, and I’ve been desperately trying to rebuild a reputation for decency ever since. I imagine the same is true for my entire readership. 

This Thanksgiving, I’m pairing my stately grandfather with a Belgian Tripel. Tripels are pale, strong beers (with ABV usually near 10 percent) that incorporate complex floral and citrus flavors with a sweet, yeasty malt backbone. This might sound similar to other Belgians beers, but the Tripel is distinct in its degree of bitterness. 

Not unlike my grandfather, the Tripel’s characteristic bite reminds me at the front of every sip that I should sip my drink slowly and respectably over the course of the night. The Allagash Tripel is by far my favorite on the market: it moves through stages of spice, candied citrus and buttery malt, amounting to a beer so complex you’ll need to have several to account for its entire spectrum of flavors.

The crazy uncle: You would think that this unprincipled, unshaven stereotype ought to be crushing Buds all night long. 

On principle, I cannot recommend a Bud Light. Not even in the noble pursuit of perpetuating stereotypes. Not even to my worst enemy. And so I suggest that you purchase a six-pack of West Coast IPA. 

IPAs push the limits of what’s palatable, but we love them anyway. One sip of this mouth-puckering, ultra-bitter brew will put the same look on your face as one of your crazy uncle’s dirty jokes, so why not kill two birds with one stone? 

I suggest Baxter Brewing’s exceedingly bitter Stowaway IPA (6.9 percent) and Sierra Nevada’s palate-torquing Torpedo Extra IPA (7.2 percent)—for their astringency and because you can find them, fittingly, in cans.

The fun aunt: Nobody rocks the pixie cut and technicolor scarf like your fun aunt. Her name is probably Deb. Her boozy alter-ego deserves a similarly merry character, so peruse aisles of your local liquor store (tip: specialty wine stores are often the best places to find a good craft beer selection) and see which of your favorite breweries are offering a holiday spiced ale. 

This style varies in its offerings, but spiced ales usually attempt to encapsulate the holidays with festive seasonal flavors: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger—maybe even some hot peppers.

The brooding, antisocial sibling: He claims that nobody understands him, but his cigarette-burned Joy Division T-shirt gives him away: he’s undeniably a stout. Plunge into the dark abyss of your humanity with the taste of roasted malt, smoke and ash. Forge in the smithy of your soul with the help of dark chocolate and bitter espresso. 

Either way, the depth and range of flavor going on in this popular and delicious style will make your eyeliner run, it’s that good. 

North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout (9 percent) is perhaps the paragon of dark, brooding brews, and luckily, you can pick up a six pack at Local on Maine Street. Two dependable backups are Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Allagash Black, both 7.5 percent ABV.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone turn down a craft beer because they “don’t like IPAs”, I could buy a six-pack right now. That IPAs (India pale ales) represent the palate of all craft beers is a misconception, of course: craft beer comprises all artisanal quality ales and lagers. But to respond to the misconceivers, I will say: I’d probably use my nickels to buy some IPA.

IPAs have become the poster-child for American craft beer. How come? It departs from the typical flavor profile of the ubiquitous lager in the same way that craft beer departs from the ubiquitous mass-market beer. Of course, all craft brews represent a “breakaway” of sorts, but the flavors in an IPA have made it an icon. 

IPAs are particularly dramatic. They are provocative brews, often toeing the boundaries of what is palatably safe with mouth-puckering bitterness, astringency and big, boozy flavors. Thus, style-wise, lagers and IPAs are in diametric opposition: IPAs are hoppy beers, where lagers are malty. Like craft beer, IPAs are an alternative to the mainstream (hipsters, it’s time to ditch your PBR), but it’s their particular taste that makes them especially symbolic.

But let’s get real, the misconception is also reinforced by the immense popularity of IPAs among craft beer drinkers. When I first started drinking beer, all I wanted was IPAs. I fell hard. I was besotted by boldness, bitterness and bite. I loved hops: how different strains and combinations brought unfamiliar, complex flavors to beer that I hadn’t tasted before. Readers, I started calling myself…a hophead.

Yes, I know, this is getting personal. I’m fine with it, however, because I’m not alone. American brewers love IPAs. Most American breweries brew at least one as a kind of staple, and many of the most popular craft breweries in the country are devoted to brewing big, hoppy beers. In fact, the American affinity for IPA (especially on the West Coast, where the majority of hops are grown) is so strong that Americans have reclaimed and redefined the style on the international stage.

The IPA actually originated in Britain. The story goes that the Brits in the metropole wanted to transport barrels of pale ale to their colonies in India, but the beer would spoil before it arrived. Their solution to this problem was to increase the amount of hops added to the boil, since hops are a preservative as well as a flavoring agent. The result: a super hoppy version of the familiar British pale ale.

Of course, what we now recognize as a British IPA wouldn’t taste anything like the astringent that likely arrived in India way back when, but it was likely what inspired the idea for hop-forward, more alcoholic pale ales. But American brewers pushed the style slightly further—after all, it’s an American tradition to break away from the British. We might even attribute the popularity and reputed “boldness” of the IPA to what Americans have done to renovate the style in recent years. These changes have been so influential that they’ve made their way back to England; I recall bending elbows at a few pubs that recommended English-brewed IPAs that were clearly modeled off the American approach. One brewer I spoke with affirmed the American influence, explaining that while the Brits can take credit for the IPA’s origin, Americans are now leading the way.

While the American “East Coast IPA” is closer in flavor profile to its British counterpart, there are plenty of hoppy, innovative IPAs brewed in Maine. The Portland brewery Bissell Brothers makes an IPA called “The Substance” (6.6 percent) that currently vies for my favorite on the market. Super hoppy, but not overpoweringly bitter, this beer actually soars towards its finish when it reaches its buttery malt base and achieves a perfect balance. You can get this beer on tap at Frontier, or buy it in a 16oz four-pack of cans.

I’ll save the Freeport-based Maine Beer Company (MBC) reviews for their own featured column, but I’d be remiss not to mention “Lunch” (7 percent). MBC loves hops, but its beers are not overly bitter and the gentle and complex interplay between hops and an almost cookie-like malt is probably why Lunch is the brewery’s most popular beer. Lastly, check out Portland’s Rising Tide’s Zephyr, if only because it’s fall, and this beer evokes the pre-winter chill with apples, citrus and pine needles. A perfect Maine beer, if I ever imagined one.