Do you like arguments? Do you like starting arguments? If you do, I have a humdinger for you. And by humdinger, I mean making some poor wine snob's face look as if it just bit a plump, wiggly cockroach in half.

Go into the most hoity-toity wine shop you can find and ask them for a range of wine styles that displays as wide a variety of flavors as possible. Tell them your goal is to see if it is true that wine has less flavor variation than beer. Tell the proprietor I told you it is true, because it is. There are more flavor variations in beer than there are in wine.

It is simple counting, when it gets down to it. Wine has grapes and yeast as ingredients. This gives wine two sources of flavor. If you put other fruits under the umbrella, you have apples, elderberries and a handful of other fruits. Sadly, most wine snobs barely count fruit wines as wine. This is odd, because grapes are a fruit and therefore grape wines are undeniably fruit wines.

Granted, there are many types of grapes, and different regions produce different flavors of grapes, even within the same varietals. However, the inescapable fact is that wine is beholden to only two basic sources for its flavor, grapes and yeast.

Beer, on the other hand, draws from a myriad of flavor sources. The key ingredients of beer are barley, hops and yeast (with water being in both wine and beer). There are many different types of barley and hops, just as there are many varietals of grapes. However, beer does not stop with barley, yeast and hops.

Oatmeal, wheat and rye are major players in many styles of beer. Then there are the adjuncts — corn and rice, mostly — used by the major breweries. In addition, many brewers experiment with a wide variety of fruits, herbs and even grapes in their beers.

Another facet to beer's complexity and flavor range is the treatment of the various grains used in brewing. Some beers call for roasted barley, while other beers utilize smoked grains. Some beers are smoked to the point that the beers they produce resemble liquid barbecue — for example, the German Ruachbier. Scottish and Scotch ales often use peat to achieve a smoky flavor.

If you doubt wine's basic simplicity, consider an experiment done by Frederic Brochet of the University of Boudreaux. Brochet assembled top wine critics and served them a glass each of white and red wine to evaluate. The devious hitch was that the red was the exact same as the white, only dyed with food coloring. Sure enough, the white was described in the language of white wines — "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively" — while the phony red elicited adjectives like "intense, spicy, supple, deep."

Having participated in blind beer tastings I am confident that one could not simply dye a Miller Lite brown and expect to hear it described as "toasty, malty and redolent with sweet esters." The beers are just so shockingly dissimilar that it would be like describing peanut butter in the verbiage of jelly.

Consider beer's superior complexity the next time you are looking for a beverage to challenge your taste buds.

— Joey Redner is a Tampa resident and world beer traveler.