Style points...The Slayer is often asked, "What is your favorite beer?" While he can answer most other questions about malt beverages at length (generally making the person inquiring sorry he ever asked), The Slayer has no response to this query.

The reason he cannot pick one favorite beer from the hundreds that have passed his lips is because each beer is a representative of a certain style. With each style having different attributes, choosing Belhaven Scottish Ale over Pilsner Urquell would be like selecting Charles Keating over Ted Bundy as his favorite criminal.

Belhaven is a heavy ale, while Pilsner Urquell is a light lager. Ted Bundy is a serial killer, Charles Keating just stole millions of dollars from unsuspecting people who spend at least 20% of their gross income on laxatives and adult diapers. Essentially, these are the apples and oranges of the beer and criminal worlds. Their can be no real comparisons drawn between them.

Because it is impossible for him to choose one favorite beer, The Slayer has personally favored beers within each of the styles. Which of these he chooses to drink on any one day is determined by many factors.

Of course, the prevailing influence on this choice is The Slayer's mood. His beer fancies change with more frequency than the fashion whims of a hormone plagued teenage girl with a subscription to Vogue. One day he might have a hankerin' for an Oatmeal Stout, the next a nice effervescently fruity Hefeweiss. The Slayer's fickleness has no real rhyme nor reason. Although, some astrologists believe it has something to with the relationship between Venus and the beer star, Hathor.

Weather also plays a major role in which beer The Slayer chooses to imbibe. Dank, cold, blustery days call for the warmth and security found in a heavy ale, like a Porter or Stout. Bright, sunny, Summer days are made for pilsners and wheat beers. The Fall is more amenable to the drinking of medium to heavy ales, such as Scottish Ales and malty Brown Ales. Spring is for Bock, if for no other reason than hundreds of years of German tradition.

The other factor that has a major impact on The Slayers choice of malt beverage style is situation. Certain beers are meant to be drunk in certain milieus. For example, when performing household or automotive repairs it would be inappropriate to be supping on a Belgian Framboise. This sort of task requires the inconsequential, bland flavor of an American Lager. (When working with electricity or on a ladder, it is probably best to forsake the beer, just ask Chuck "The Ground" Gordon and "Concussion" Cooper.)

Just as not all beer is of the same style, brews which fall within a certain style can be different. Most styles also have many substyles that fit within their boundaries of delineation. Wheat Beers have nine substyles, Pilsner has three and Stout has five. Each of these branches on the style limb have certain flavor nuances that make them somewhat different than another beer of that type. For those who have merely emersed their big toe in the vast pool of the beer world, substyles will be the distant ripples they see on the horizon. As these novices ease in up to their torso, these tiny waves will become more clearly delineated.

The Slayer, digging still deeper into the brewing filter bed, also knows that an individual beer within a certain substyle or style can be distinctly different from another beer of the same classification. While some of the flavor differences can be the result of the addition or subtraction of the amount of a type of malt (especially roasted barley, chocolate and black patent), most result from hops.

In this country, The Slayer has noticed that their are regional differences between beers of the same type. Ubiquitous styles, such as Pale Ale and Brown Ale, will have a distinctly different hop character depending on what part of the country in which they are brewed. If they are from the West Coast (Oregon, Washington or California), these brews will be hopped up like a "Deadhead" in a VW Microbus. While, malt beverages of the same type from locales East of the Mississippi generally have a more malty character.

This trend seems to hold virtually true across the entire microbrew board. Why? you may ask. The Slayer, as is his habit, has what he thinks is the answer.

The microbrew revolution came out of the resurgence of home brewing. Those that brewed at home loved to use hops liberally. Many of the brewing avocationists turned vocationists were from the West Coast. Once they introduced these beers to the public and garnered a sizable following, Sierra Nevada is a prime example, they had to stick with the highly hopped beers of their microbrew infancy or have their customers desert them like a bullet besieged human rights activist in China.

The Eastern brewers, many of which came along after their Western counterparts, made maltier beers for two reasons. They did not live in a place where hop plants were as prevalent as racial slurs at a KKK watering hole, and they needed to give the public a product uniquely different than that which was already available.

Intercountry style nuances are as interesting as intracountry differences. The Slayer recently had the pleasure of sampling Samuel Smith's IPA once again (for free). What struck him immediately, after having tasted the American IPA cornucopia, was that this English IPA (the country of the substyle's origin) was more complex and maltier than its Yankee brother.

Everything else was similar, the color a bit darker because of the obvious use of darker, English caramel malts, but the beer, while having adequate hop character for the style, was not "in your face" hoppy. It was much more balanced and rounded.

Probably the reason Samuel Smith's IPA is not as hoppy as domestically produced beers of the substyle is that the English have never really embraced the hop. In fact, until the 1400's, English "Ale" did not contain hops. It was the Flemish who introduced hopped "Beer" (the distinction between "Ale" and "Beer" being the presence of hops) to the "Isle of Stiff Upper Lips." For centuries "Beer," the malt beverage with hops, was regarded by many as inferior to the "Ales" in England. Eventually the virtues of the bittering herb were appreciated; but, The Slayer feels, never embraced with the same zeal as the Germans and Americans.

It's all about style. While The Slayer is not a slave to fashion, spending most of his clothing dollar on garments with brewery logos on them, he is acutely aware of beer styles. Such is the plight of his malty, palate andvantaged existance.

With church key and pint glass in hand, he forges forward. There's a bar stool somewhere without his gluteal imprint.