Ellie is 24 months old and has been to 22 breweries. She likes sitting on bar stools and playing with coasters and pouring from the help-yourself water jugs some spots offer. At home, when I open the fridge to get her a snack, she points to the bottom shelf and says to no one in particular, “Thas’ daddo’s beer.” Sometimes, when I’m drinking from a can and she’s sucking her sippy cup, she asks me to “cheers” her and we clink our respective vessels. She has snatched my Other Half tulip off the coffee table when I’m not paying attention, but, luckily, she has never drank from it.

Through it all, she has, oddly, improved my beer-drinking palate.

You wouldn’t think having a child would improve your drinking life in any way. Yeah, you might start drinking more—how else to handle the interminable stress?—but surely you’d expect to have less time to go to bars, go to breweries, acquire cool beers and enjoy them in an intellectual way. Indeed, when Ellie was born two years ago, I quickly found those things to be true, true, true, and true. Rather, it’s the newfound simplicity of raising a small child, with their bland cuisine, which has unexpectedly helped me on the beer-tasting front.

Ellie is currently obsessed with raisins. They’re the first thing on her mind when she wakes up in the morning. “I can have ra-ins?” she asks the second I open the door and flick on the lights at 6:30AM. I give her a tiny matchbox-sized Sun-Maid and she extracts individuals raisins with her tiny fingers. Because she’s a toddler, she’ll often drop one accidentally. My floors are clean enough, but you can’t give a kid food off the floor and I’m often too lazy to go throw them away, so I eat them myself. The first time I did this, I probably hadn’t tasted a raisin in 30 years. I mean, I had tasted raisins in, say, trail mix or carrot cake, but I’m not sure I had eaten a singular raisin by itself in some 30 years. That’s key.

That afternoon I happened to be conducting a blind tasting of Belgian trappist beers. Now any experienced beer drinker can quickly offer some tasting notes for Belgian dubbels, tripels, and quads, without even having one in front of them. “Dark fruits” is often a common descriptor. In other words, figs and dates and prunes and, yes, raisins. But, again, how often do you ever actually taste those individual fruits to actually have a strong sense of what they truly taste like?

In a way, when we’re saying this Belgian quad tastes like, oh I don’t know, medjool dates, we’re referencing a flavor that we referred to as medjool dates the last time we tasted a Belgian quad. Not because we’ve tasted an unadulterated medjool date any time recently. But now I taste raisins every day—and at that Belgian beer tasting, the flavors of raisins were just exploding on my palate and in my mind. Gritty and sweet Thompson raisins, tangy Black Corinth raisins and even light, fruity golden raisins. I suddenly felt a heightened ability to taste, to describe my palate, all thanks to Ellie and her boring diet.