Fruity beers??? You realize you were Norsk at one time, right?

So I suppose you're just not a beer fan. I kind of understand regarding your Guinness comment. The first time I tried Guinness I could not believe that anyone would want to drink it, it was one of the most disgusting things I'd ever tried. The same goes for beer, I remember, back when I was a teenager, referring to beer as "a glass of vomit". I, too, would opt for rum and my drink of choice back then was Bacardi. Things have changed for me, obviously.

Centuries ago here in England, drinking ale [before beer was invented] was not just a commodity but a necessity. In the 15/16th centuries, and I'm sure before, plain water was not safe enough to drink since it was full of contaminants, so by mixing it with a little alcohol, a lot of the bad bacteria was killed off. This meant that all through the day, your average farm and village worker was drinking light ale, only to drink the strong evening ale when they returned back home from their work. I suppose it's no leap of faith to see how this could be turned into an industry. Like so many things in the world [including religion], everything comes back to harvest and the fertility of the land.

Like rum and whisky, beer is an acquired taste, as you know, and there are so many different varieties I don't think it's fair, accurate or even possible to say it's all horrible. The stuff from Russia is different to classic English ale which is different to Belgian tripels which are different to lighter Latin beers which are different to IPAs. The sheer variety is overwhelming. Some of it is horrible and some of it is beautiful, but the beauty of taste - quite literally - is that what is horrible to me might be beautiful to you.

I will concur that a lot of beer that you get in your average pub or off licence is crap. Much of the mainstream stuff sold by, e.g. Interbrew is low-grade rubbish and people just buy into the name. A enjoyable personal experiment is for me to take friends to one or two of my favourite specialist beer bars in Soho and introduce them to some proper Trappist stuff. It's entertaining to watch it dawn on them that all these years they've been drinking dishwater and that, somewhere in the world, there are breweries that know and care what real beer should be about. Like a good meal, good beer should be a focal point of a social evening, and not purely a means to get inebriated. But like so many things that are popularised, quality is often lost to commercialism.

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+1

Interbrew are part of AB InBev. They were already massive, they got bigger, then they bought out SAB Miller about two years ago and got bigger still.

Once you have a massive global corporation brewing stuff using the same highly industrialised methods which mainly focus on increasing output, advertising that your beer was brewed by Monks since the 14th century or whatever, just seems a little hollow... The "uniqueness" has already been lost.

The company's flagship products are quite arguably, Stella Artois, Budweiser, Becks, Miller and Fosters. All of which fall into the "piss" category. Of those, Stella Artois was once (decades ago...) not half bad, now it's gone down the same generic route as every other drink produced by this brewer (losing 0.1% every few years, so they can sell more of it...). In essence, cheap or pretentious swill for the masses. Even their "classier" products such as Leffe and Hoegaarden are very vulgar tasting,(Chimay and Kwak are superior in ever respect).

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I was very surprised to find out Sapporo bought The Anchor Brewing Company about 1-1/2 years ago. There are many micro-breweries in this area, but to me they all taste like they were aged in green pinewood casks.

I didn't know Intergoo had got hold of Leffe as well. I thought I was imagining that there was a taste difference. I was sure that blonde and brune both used to taste better years ago.

With regard to the Chimay you reference, here's another example of people discovering 'better' beer. I took my sister-in-law to one of the beer bars in central London and she fell in love with the place, having always drunk Turkish beer her whole life [Efes, which is quite nice for what it is in situ; Tuborg Gold which is barely passable and Bomonti which is like drinking weak orange squash]. She loved everything there, especially the Chimay [White]. She liked it so much that she took the empty bottle back with her to Turkey.

EDIT: cynwulf - are you on Untappd? I have a feeling you'd enjoy it if you're not.

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to cheers Slackware while drinking Molson Dry up in Canada.
My first experience with Slackware was back in 1996 when I visited my local computer store (I ended up working for them). It was Infomagic's Linux Developer's Resource, and it came with Slackware 3.1 and RedHat something.
I didn't know what Linux was, so I bought the set and decided to install Slackware, and I was amazed. It was almost as easy as a Windows install. Sure I had to learn about some new terminology, like partitions and whatnot, but I was a full-on computer nerd at this point.
When the login came up and it said darkstar:~$ or something like that, I was hooked. When I rebooted or shutdown, it said "Daaarrrkkstaarr's coming down."
Totally rad and cool for a 14 year old.
DarkStar's such a cool name, even to my 36 year old self.

Unfortunately it was a little too complex for me, and I quickly went back to Windows and games.
I think my next Linux love was Red Hat, then Mandrake, then I tried Corel Linux OS.
Always, though, I would go back to Windows for the games.
When Vista was released, I bought a Toshiba laptop in 2006 that could barely run it. I think it had the bare minimum specs to run Vista. At this point, I had given up on desktop PCs and the chase-for-more, and I decided laptops were better for what I needed to do, which was light web-browsing and word processing and other grandmother-esque things.
With the travesty of Vista I again turned my attention to Linux, and after distro-hopping I think I settled on Ubuntu because everything more-or-less worked out of the box.
It worked great on my laptop, made it speedier than ever. Unfortunately, I couldn't play a lot of PC games (not that I could to begin with, considering the hardware that laptop had) but I had a PlayStation 3 for that.
That's about when I ran a Linux distro full-time.
A couple of years later when Windows 7 came out I bought a new laptop (CAD$1200) and it was an HP dv9000 series. If you know anything about this laptop, never, ever buy it used. Nvidia shipped a bunch of defective chips to HP, and rather than recall, they put them in anyway. My warranty ran out 14 months after I bought it. So I bought a new motherboard for $150 and replaced it myself. It failed after 4 months. I "reflowed" the chips by using a heat-gun and heavy duty aluminum foil (my dad was an electronics tech, and even he questioned this method) and it failed after 2 months.
Never. Buying. HP. Ever. Again.

*downs beer*

Sorry for the tangent. So in around 2010 or 11 my dad (rest in peace) said "hey, we're getting rid of some of these old computers from work, do you think you can do anything with them?" I said sure.
So I had 3 different tower computers circa 2002 hardware and 2 different older desktop-style computers circa 1999 computers , and my project was to make headless diskless Folding@Home processors.
They each had network cards, so I plugged them all into a hub and designated one as the server, and they would boot from it via PXE and download the OS via network and immediately start running the command-line Folding@home program, and they would each work on a chunk of data.
It was so cool. The thing was, I couldn't do it in Ubuntu. I tried and tried and failed. Then I thought, "hmm, maybe I'll try Slackware."
And it worked like a charm. I had a read a hell of a lot but I learned a hell of a lot, too.
Unfortunately my dad pulled the plug on my project after a month or so because the electricity bill jumped. "But dad," I said, "Folding@Home simulates folding proteins which might lead to a cure for Alzheimer's. You might need it someday." Despite my protestations, I cancelled the project after a month or two. Turns out, he didn't need it. He died of lung cancer instead.

So with Windows 10 being basically a spybot, I'm thinking of jumping ship again, this time to Slackware. I've used Mint, and I like it, but it has crashed on me occasionally. I also don't like that it's tied to Ubuntu's release cycle (more or less).
I'm not sure about systemd, so I'm hesitant to use any distro with it. I've read good (even from an Arch developer) and bad things about it.
I'll try Slackware in the New Year again.

I'm also going to send Pat $100 through snail mail next year. I think the learning experience was worth it.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good beer!

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In a pub in Brighton and look what I found, a relic from a local brewery - rather relevant to Slackware. Have a great Boxing Day, slackers.

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Wow, what a difference a month makes. I'm down further in the south of England nearer the coast. No PC here, but I have a decent Dell laptop running Slackware, as well as good music and beer. Hope everyone is having a good night.

this is what i like to do when the weather permits, i hang a hammock in the back yard where there is nothing but trees and birds & squirrels, occasionally a deer will wander through the yard

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Two beers tasted today, an Omnipollo Bianca and Dugges Big Black Apple.

Dugges taste very interesting, a lot of licorice flavour with black apple, veryy tasty!

Cheers fellow Slackers!

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Cheers to you too! This is the situation here, a mini laptop party with some English organic bitter on the go. Very decent it is, too. Hope everyone is having a good night.

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Loooove St Peter's English Ale and Sorgum Beer... Amazing stuff.. Didnt think anyone else drank it
EDIT: How could I forget the best Stout on the market??

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My favorite beer, brewed in a nearby monastery, by monks. It's quite delicious. Having a lazy sunday behind (in front of) the computer ..

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I've been running Slackware on a HP (workstation, not laptop) since 2010 - started on this machine with 13.1 (but it wasn't the first one with Slackware, just my first HP) and the hardware has never failed me yet, more than 8 years later (oct 2010 to feb 2019).
OK: I did have to replace a DVD drive (rom, not writer) but that was a good opportunity to replace it with a internal writer instead of the external USB DVD writer I used until then.

Everything they brew is amazing. When I was in the Netherlands, their tripel was mostly what I drank.

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