One of the benefits of being a home brewer (see more about that at my other site, awesomepickle.com) is that you have license to try a lot of beer, and a lot of different kinds of beer. In the last few years a new kind of store has popped up to help beer lovers discover beer’s many styles, a lot like wine bars and tasting rooms have done for wine drinkers. I wrote an article in the New York Times about five such tasting rooms for beer.

Say you want to know more about what distinguishes a Kolsch (which is in the bottles above, photo by the inimitable Phil) and a Helles than Wikipedia and BeerAdvocate can tell you? At these stores you can taste the difference. With education as their goal, they stock hundreds of kinds of bottled craft beer and keep a constant rotation on the tap. They’ll recommend beer and food pairings and they tend to be liberal with the free samples, too. But don’t tell them I told you that.