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Like most people, Tomm Carroll tasted his first beer as a kid. While growing up in Jersey, his father offered him a sip of his favorite canned beverage –– in this case, Piels, a regional lager, then brewed in Brooklyn. And again like most people, young Carroll hated it. Spit it out. A bored beer drinker in late high school and college, Carroll became interested in beer when beer became interesting. First it was the imports from Europe and Asia coming in to these shores; then it was the nascent microbreweries and brewpubs popping up all over. Beer was suddenly something different: those different tastes and colors and styles. This was not his father’s Piels. After moving to Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1980s, Carroll became a frequent visitor to –– and champion of –– such early brewpubs as Gorky’s Russian Café and Brewery (downtown LA and Hollywood) and, later in the decade, City of Angels in Santa Monica and Wolfgang Puck’s trendy restaurant/microbrewery Eureka in West LA –– all of them sadly long gone. By the 1990s, Carroll (a writer and editor by trade) was reviewing bars and clubs for the Daily Breeze and the Santa Monica Outlook and began writing about their beer offerings. He started visiting microbreweries and brewpubs around the region and the state, and soon, domestic and international travel begat even more beer knowledge –– and interest. Belgium was a particular epiphany in beer appreciation. Today, Carroll is a feature writer and the LA correspondent for the Celebrator Beer News, which, at 20 years old in 2008, is the oldest beeriodical in the country. He has also written about beer for the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Today. He is a member of the Brewers Association, the national organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of craft beer. An experienced beer judge in both homebrew and commercial competitions, Carroll is also a member of Pacific Gravity, the award-winning Culver City-based homebrew club, and serves on the club’s Board of Directors, as well as contributes to its monthly newsletter. In addition, he serves as an advisor to the La Quinta Arts Council for the desert city’s “Blues, Brews and Barbecues” festival in the Fall. And when he has time, he tries to get to Europe as often as he can. Despite such an inauspicious initiation to tasting beer, Carroll wound up becoming an avid beer drinker, enthusiast, collector, writer, judge and traveler. He drinks locally and globally. But he still never developed a taste for that fizzy yellow lager. beerscribe@earthlink.net