Walking down the beer aisle can be more than a little confusing lately. It seems rare now to find a beer section with only the beer your dad drinks. How do you make sense of it all? As you revisit this column each issue, I hope to help you answer that question.

We'll start with the basic architecture of beer.

Despite the vast selection available, all beer uses the same building blocks. Dating back to 1487, Bavarian leaders defined the German beer purity law, or the Reinheitsgebot. This law states beer can only contain water, barley, hops and yeast.

Obviously, this law is not legally significant in the US, but many beers do follow the same recipe.

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The malted barley provides the malty, sweet flavor in beer, as well as providing the sugars that the yeast convert into alcohols and carbon dioxide.

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The hops balance the maltiness with their bitterness, contributing a complexity of flavors.

And the water is the means through which the beer making process takes place.

All parameters of these ingredients can affect the taste, appearance and feel of beer, so even working inside the tight definition presented above, brewers are able to produce a wide variety of beer styles.