Eight facets of beer.

The Session: Beer Blogging Friday is a monthly blog-in, held on the first Friday of each month, in which beer bloggers write on a given beer-related topic. The topic on 6 May was "Surviving a Beer Mid-Life Crisis." At his blog, Literature & Libation, Oliver Gray, May's host, asked:

Recently, I’ve found my interest in said hobby waning. The brilliant luster of new beers and new breweries looks now, a few pounds heavier and a bunch of dollars lighter, more like dull aluminum oxide. Do you find it hard to muster the same zeal for beer as you did a few years ago? Are you suffering through a beer-life crisis like I am? If so, how do you deal with it?

I answered his question with a contribution entitled, "Enjoy the beer; forget the hype." But it was something I had written as an aside, weeks before The Session —as a comment at another beer blog— in which I may have better drilled down to the lode.

Call it the seven ur-facets of beer.

There’s beer as a business; beer as tax revenue; beer as science and technology; beer as one (small) study point in history; beer as an alcohol delivery system; beer as a diverting avocation. Each except the last is specific to a limited concern. A loss of interest in the last calls for a new hobby. There’s little semiotic about it.

I had forgotten that I had written that until Mr. Gray kindly reminded me. In his summary of the sixteen submissions to The Session, he found that almost all the contributors had written, independently, on an identical monad: "Embrace the mania."

Mania, indeed! Let's call pleasure the eighth ur-facet of beer. Then, let's go grab a beer.

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• The Session #111: Surviving a Beer Midlife Crisis.
  • Oliver Gray announced the topic at Literature & Libation: here.
  • He summarized the contributions: here.
• More about The Session: Beer Blogging Friday, and how to host it or write for it: here, at Brookston Beer Bulletin.
• According to the Beer Bloggers Conference there are about 700 'citizen' bloggers in the United States. On average, fewer than 2% of them participate in The Session on any given month. (The Conference's number is based on bloggers who register with the service; there are most probably many more who do not.) Participation is not North American-restricted —current U.S. presidential politics, notwithstanding; respondents often write in from the rest of the world, as some did this month.


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