For good beer, you can always depend on
mickey's (it comes in 40's and comes in 6 and 12 pack wide mouth bottles), it's so much better than the staple beer of mgd, heineken, busch, and so on. Another beer you might like and is my favorite is
guinness, it's dark stuff, a little bitter, but i think you'll like it a lot the first time you have it, it's also very smooth textured. Another beer you might like is
pyramid apricot ale, it tastes like an average ale, except with the tiniest hint of apricot, takes some getting used to but it's pretty delicious stuff.
If you really want to experiment with some beer, you should try buying some really good sweet beer, that stuff is awesome as well, though i don't know the kind of sweet beer i had last as people were pouring me cups of it and never saw the label. As far as getting stuff in america goes, you can get all the beer i mentioned in about any liquor store. But, one thing you're definitely not getting which i highly recommend is the alaskan brand of beer that is up here, it's good, and has so many varieties and it's good beer from the biggest state in the union

I'm a hard alcohol guy, but i'm getting away from alcohol a bit in my own way and that made my inclination turn toward beer, and i think with the stuff i had it's damn good.
Of course with beer, stay away from the nasty staple beers you mentioned, stay away from steel reserve (oh god no), and stay away from ESB (extra special bitter), ESB just makes good beer worse. I'll go for ESB when i bite into a pine tree.
....i've heard good stuff about fosters......