Bud. Weis. Er, don't you have something better?

There’s something classy about beer. It may not always seem like it, especially when one lives in a college town where the stuff is pounded back like it’s water, but few beverages are prepared with as much care and devotion to variation.

Wine might seem like it fits that bill, but only partially. There isn’t much of a market for experimentation in wine making. Perhaps that says something about wine connoisseurs, or perhaps it just means the process of making wine is too delicate to allow for much variation. With beer, on the other hand, it sometimes seems like the sky is the limit.

Last year, Dogfish Head brewery announced that it would be making a replica of a 9,000-year-old Chinese “beer.” The actual drink probably would not have been recognizable as beer to modern consumers; it would have been made with mostly non-standard ingredients and would have featured annoying blobs of yeast floating around. In the beer’s reincarnated form, the process and ingredients are streamlined to create something more recognizable as beer.

Although that may be one of the most extreme examples of experimenting with beer recipes, it’s far from unique. Just take a stroll through your local grocery store and it’s possible to find beers that use unorthodox ingredients. There are beers made with fruits, nuts and spices, none of which taste anything like Budweiser. I recently had a chocolate beer, which was more of a dessert than anything. There are also beers that challenge the limits of alcohol concentration. It is possible to find beers with concentrations as high as 16 percent, and some beers even go above 20 percent alcohol, completely changing the way one drinks them. Rather than something to be chugged, these drinks are meant to be savored.

So for those who are ready to try something a bit more exciting (and also happen to be of the legal age), it’s time to start exploring different beers. Some nicer stores offer sampler pack options, which allow one to compare multiple brands. Some are bound to be duds (the one advantage of mega-brands like Budweiser is that they have the resources to put out a very homogeneous product), but there may be some winners in the pack.

Perhaps you’ll even find something people will want to recreate 9,000 years from now.

Maybe.