Necessity was my teacher. At intermission, we'd be flooded with requests for American cocktails with exotic names my British boss had never heard of. Given my citizenship, he assumed I had. But I learned. Not as much as I learned about beer, though, both in terms of its breadth and my ability to appreciate it.
British beer is a glorious libation.
It simply took some time for me to get used to it. In an era before stylish microbreweries and beer snobbishness approached wine's reputation, my undergraduate concept of a brew was confined to golden lager, served cold, preferably in a cup at a ballgame or in a pitcher at a bar. Adequate thirst-quenchers all, lagers are almost transparent to look at, nondescript to the nose and best downed cold and fast. My first British beer, a John Courage pulled from a cask in the underground cellar by the barman at the tap, opened my senses to beer's possibilities. It was a class of ale called pale, and the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't very pale at all.