Short answer: One of everything!
For the newly craft-beer curious, making a selection from the rows and rows of bottles at the retailer or from pages listing hundreds of beers on a pub menu can be daunting. Make the wrong choice and get a new, different or disagreeable taste and someone may be scared away from craft beer forever.
Start with the basics
The BJCP formally recognizes almost 100 different and distinct beer styles, not including the numerous variations of fruit and spice additions, barrel-aging, smoked and specialty malts, blends and the few hybrid styles that just cannot be categorized. But if you want to educate your palate, start simple and at the beginning.
A good starter beer should be a simple craft lager—nothing fancy. Stay away from the corporate beers or anything with “light” on the label. Standard lagers are basic and crowd-pleasing, with acceptable levels of sweetness, low levels of hops and a satisfying light malt flavor. Examples: Shiner Blonde, Brooklyn Lager, Stella Artois.
The next beer to try should be an amber ale, preferably from a local or regional brewery. An ale has slightly more body and flavor than a lager, and the lightly toasted malt makes the basic American amber ale another consumer favorite and easy drinker. Examples: Saint Arnold Amber Ale, Live Oak Big Bark Amber, New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale.
Start to specialize
With the benchmarks of standard lagers and amber ales on your palate, explore the specialty brewing ingredients starting with the wheat beers. Wheat beers (sometimes listed as the German weizen) are tremendously popular in Texas because they are full-bodied, slightly sweet and perfectly suited for hot-weather drinking. Examples: Rahr & Sons Summertime Wheat, Pyramid Hefeweizen, Paulaner Hefe-Weizen.
Less popular in Texas summers are the stouts, ales with heavier bodies and robust, roasted malt flavors. Some of these you might delay until the holiday season, when the complex and layered tastes of chocolate and coffee are better suited for the cooler weather and more seasonal examples appear on shelves. Examples: Southern Star Buried Hatchet Stout, Rogue Shakespeare Stout, Belhaven Stout.
From this point, let your curiosity wander. Try related styles such as bocks, pale ales, IPAs, fruit beers, dunkelweiss and imperial stouts and compare them to the flavor profiles you already know. Figure out what you like and don't like. Overall, don’t ever be afraid to sample something new, unknown and different.
Cheers!
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