Today is Star Wars Day: May 4, or May the Fourth—as in, May the Fourth Be With You.

It’s also the first Friday of the month, which means today is also The Session—group beer blogging day. British beer writer Pete Brown is hosting this month’s edition of The Session, and has chosen for us to write about a topic that is possibly one of the most subjective I’ve yet seen: The Beer Moment.

My approach to beer writing is by no means the only approach, but I write to try to encourage other people to share the simple joy of beer as much as I do, to switch on people who drink beer but don’t particularly care about it that much, to suggest to them that there’s so much more they might enjoy.  No one says you have to do it this way, and no one ever made me the spokesperson for beer.  It’s just how I decided to write, in the same way others decided to write in an opinionated way about what they love, and what they hate.

So in that spirit, my choice of topic – with 62 topics already covered – is this: simply, the Beer Moment.

What is it?

Well, what is it to you?  What does that phrase evoke for you?

That’s the most important thing here.  Switch off and float downstream, what comes to mind?  Don’t analyse it – what are the feelings, the emotions?

To my mind Pete has picked a very Joycean topic, in the stream-of-consciousness sense, and that’s what he’s invoking intentionally; otherwise, as we do when we drink and review beer, we tend to over-analyze, and over-think the beer. So—

Excitement. Particularly for trying something new. I can’t help it, I get excited about trying new beers—whether it’s a new beer I picked up and is sitting in my fridge, or a new homebrew that I’ve made, or the latest beer to go on tap at one of the breweries in town. Hell, I get excited about drinking beer I’ve had many times over—knowing there’s a cold bottle of whatever waiting for me when I leave work and get home—that’s a moment.

Another moment is the social one; visiting with friends over beer, hanging out at the brewpub or on the back patio or whatever, splitting special bottles or laughing over pints, meeting new friends who like good beer—all moments.

Happiness. I don’t mean that the beer by itself makes me happy—well, drink enough and everyone gets happy—but that it’s these types of moments that I associate with beer than make me happy: the chance to try something new, to see good friends, to relax, to laugh, to give me something to write about, to be a part of something like The Session. That sounds corny maybe. But there it is.

The “moment” is defined by all of these things to varying degrees for me. And each moment is unique, because each day is unique, and each beer is unique. What could be better than that?