The beer you like tends to be the beer you grew up with: not necessarily the first you tasted as a teenager, but the stuff of pubs and parties and youthful exploration.
The beer today tastes fizzy and sweet, like ale-flavoured soft drink: true beer, real ale, is flat,or at the most has a slight sparkle. A creamy head, yes; fizzy no. Bitter yes, sugary no.
Beer is made to entice young drinkers, making the change from lolly-water to lolly-ale as encouraging as possible, with a very high alcohol content to whack the imbiber between the ears with an immediate zonk.
Real ale, on the contrary, is, as the ad men say, for real thirsts: two quick limpid pints in quick succession, then settle down to really enjoy the gentle, cool bitterness of the hops and the rich tasty liquid food of the malted barley. The low alcohol content of, say, less than 3%, is the added bonus, the icing on the cake, enlivening the conversation in a gradual ascent over a period of many pints, to arrive at a pleasing plateau of fellowship and bursting bladder, the urgent relief of which is gratification enough.
Ice-cold, fizzy beer is not a drink, it is a regurgitation challenge to the oesophagus, a tooth-numbing assault to the mouth, exploding with froth in exactly the wrong place: it cannot be drunk and enjoyed, it must be sipped and quelled before swallowing tiny bird-sips. It is a girly-drink for egg-cups.
The real test of beer is to see what it tastes like with all the fizz gone, and at room temperature: try it, your usual frigid, gassy, sugary malt-water will taste like dog-piss. Try it with a cola drink and experience the foulest liquid on the planet. A good beer in this state requires only a slight cooling to be entirely palatable.
So say NO to brewing multinationals, search for the Good Stuff, treat your drinking hours to real pleasure. Intake quality, put the best brew into your system, keep out the chemical irritations.