I don't remember much about my first beer except thinking that it would be my last. I was around 13 at the time; it was probably my father who let me have a taste. And since that taste, from my inexperienced perspective, was unaccountably nasty, and since it was my father who gave it to me, I wasn't much invested in enjoying it. (He's been sober for many years now, but at the time he was a long ways away from laying off the booze.)
So it was a surprise, a few years later, when I had a beer and liked it. Maybe it was again just a matter of circumstance: I was an exchange student in India, the woman serving me was my Indian "mother" (an elegant woman who looked kind of like Lena Horne), and the beer had been spiked with lemonade. It was not beer but shandy, a genteel libation with British roots, and I don't know that I'd like it much anymore — nowadays I take my beer straight, no lemons. But when I was 16, lounging on a veranda in Poona (now Pune) during monsoon season, it tasted just fine.
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2007.