When I was a younger and far more irresponsible guy, I used to like to drink a lot of beer and then laugh for a long time and fall down. My friends and I thought that there was no better way to spend our weekends than by drinking far too much beer and behaving irresponsibly. I'm not proud of that, but it's not particularly unusual… lots of guys go through that in their twenties. I was one of them.

I didn't drink any alcohol at all from the age of 26 to the age of 35. When I got sober, I realized that the only way to curb my dysfunctional drinking was to stop drinking altogether. I'm glad I did, I really believe it took those nine years of absolute tee totaling for me to get mature enough to be able to have just one beer and stop.

Part of it is my compulsive nature… and other part of it is that I really was just a flat-out drunk in my early and mid twenties. I finally got to the point that I had to quit because I was behaving really badly. Several years after I quit, during a difficult part of my life, I started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. There, I learned that what I'd done was quit drinking without ever dealing with the issues that were causing me to abuse alcohol. By no longer drinking, I'd really just treated the symptom, but never really addressed the disease. I was letting myself off too easy. There were real issues that I needed to address and that I'd never addressed. I'd quit abusing alcohol, and that was good... but that didn't let me off the hook. There was more work to be done.

Anyway, long story short, after years of church and counseling and hard work to get my life back on track, I'm finally able to drink like a grown man should drink. That is to say, once in a blue moon, I take a notion to have a beer. Wendy and I will get a six pack and we'll each drink one… then, a few nights later, we'll have another beer each… and then finish the last two off a week or so later. We never have a beer in front of the kids and we never have a beer while we're out. Once you've had bad beer habits, it's a good idea to remember your history vividly.

I said all of that to say this: I've always thought myself to be something of a wise guy about beer; kind of a beer connoisseur. I know the good stuff from the bad stuff (or so I thought) and I don't drink the crappy stuff, I drink the good stuff.

One night last week when I was at work, someone brought in a magazine that listed the top 100 beers, according to some survey. I was interested in the article, and I was distressed to realize that I'd only ever heard of maybe twenty five of the beers. Turns out, at some point during my nine years of absolutely no drinking, the beer world moved on without me.

One of the beers listed in the magazine was Samuel Adams Utopias, which isn't really a beer because it contains five times more alcohol by volume than the legal amount of alcohol for American beer. That's it, there in the picture to the left. Check out that fancy-shmansy bottle. Looks more like a blunt medieval weapon than a beer bottle, don't it? And for every twelve ounces of the stuff you drink, you've consumed the alcohol content of five regular beers. No thanks. I've got kids. Somebody could get up in the middle of the night and fall down the stairs and knock a hole in his or her head, and then I've gotta get 'em to the emergency room. I can't be drinking that super beer stuff. I'll leave that to suicidal college kids and guys with iron stomachs.

Anyway, as it turns out, my suspicions were right. The article in the magazine implied that I no longer know anything about beer, and I've just confirmed it tonight on the internet. I checked out ratebeer.com, which really is a pretty cool website. There's a page there dedicated to just about every beer you can think of, with a rating that combines the opinions of all the beer snobs who are registered at the site. Well, as it turns out, not only have I not only never heard of the highest rated beers at the site, but the ones I genuinely like are rated pretty darn low. All this time, I've been turning my nose up at Coors and Budweiser and Old Milwaukee, preferring instead to sip my occasional import… and, as it turns out, the beer world doesn't give a rip about imports anymore. All they care about are these odd beers from microbreweries and family owned breweries that I've never heard of.

The top rated stuff in the world is beer like "Raspberry Ale" and "Chocolate Stout" and "Honey Lager," etc. I'm just out in the cold on that stuff. I wouldn't know what to do with "Raspberry Ale." I'd rather pour it on pancakes than drink it.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's my top five beers for occasional sippin' and relaxin'. As it turns out, I have the unrefined taste of a sewer-dwelling cretin, so you'd probably do well to ignore this list and check out ratebeer.com instead… but, for what it's worth…

My all time favorite beer is Bass Pale Ale. I think it's absolutely delicious. It has a bit of a bitter taste, a little bit of bite to it… which is to say, it actually tastes like beer instead of tasting like Sprite that someone served in a dirty glass that once had beer in it. My big problem with American beer is that it's so watered down, so bland, so tasteless. You can actually taste Bass Ale. It announces it's presence with authority. It has an actual flavor to it, and a nice aroma, too. Again, as it turns out, my taste in beer is totally bottom rung, but this schmuck prefers Bass Pale Ale over anything out there.

Fosters Lager is, in my opinion, the second best beer out there. It comes down to a matter of how it tastes, and I love it for the same reason I love Bass: It tastes good. It doesn't have quite the bite of Bass, and it is a little smoother, which actually gets a little old to me by the time I finish a Fosters. Still, the taste is pleasant, and just bitter enough to keep my attention. What's more, Fosters is the only beer I know of that actually tastes good in a can. Those famous Fosters "oil cans" must be made out of some mystery alloy or something, because they don't ruin the taste of the lager at all.

Lowenbrau is kind of an "old timer's beer," I suppose. It's been around for a long time, and from the time I was five years old or so, I knew their TV commercial jingle from the '70's by heart. ("Here's to good friends, tonight is kinda special, the beer we'll pooooour, must be something more somehow….") Anyway, Lowenbrau Dark is my prefered Lowenbrau brew, and around here it's kind of hard to find, but it's really very tasty. It's hard to find around these parts, anyway, it might be as common as dirt elsewhere. I don't know. I prefer dark and heavy beers to light, crisp, "sorority" beers, and Lowenbrau Dark is worth picking up now and then.

Dos Equis Dark is the only Mexican beer I have any use for. I know a lot of people like Corona, but I think that stuff tastes like lemonade. I just can't stand it. Dos Equis Dark is a darn good dark beer, but it's gotten really hard to find, too. It used to be that I could get it at just about any Mexican restaurant I ever went to, but that's not the case anymore. Oh, sure, you can still get that nasty ol' Corona, but I'd just as soon order a Coke. Another thing: I never understood the whole thing of putting a wedge of lime in a beer. I've seen people do that with Corona a thousand times. My take on it is, if you liked the taste of Corona to begin with, you wouldn’t have to doctor it up.

Killian's Red is a decent "cheap beer." You can usually find it at places that only have cheap beer, and at four and a half bucks for a six-pack, you don't have to go in debt to drink it. I was surprised to find out that Coors brews Killian's, considering that I think that Coors beer is absolutely awful. Killian's is pretty good, though. It's not great, but it has a little more flavor than the usual convenience store brews out there, and you can do worse than to grab a six-pack of it from time to time.

Those are the five beers that I enjoy the most in the world… and until recently, I thought they were pretty good beer. As it turns out, they're nothing special, but I still like them.