It’s the first Friday of the month, so it’s time for another round of The Session!

This month’s Session topic is brought to us by Tasha at MetaCookbook, and she’s asking for The Hard Stuff:

“Beer” is its own subculture at this point. There’s an expected “look” and expected desires. Beer festivals are everywhere. Beer blogs flourish; indeed at this point there’s reasonable sub categories for them. New breweries are popping up at record pace; the US alone has more than 3,000. Big breweries are getting bigger, some are being purchased, some are saying that’s bullshit.

But we’re still fairly monolithic as a group. And there are a number of problems related to that tendency toward sameness. Not all problems related are personal, for example trademark disputes are becoming more commonplace as we all have the same “clever thought”.

We have such a good time with our libation of choice that sometimes we fear bringing up the issues we see.

Well, stop that. Air your concerns, bring up those issues. Show us what we’re not talking about and should be, and tell us why.

When I first saw the title of this month’s topic I thought it referred to hard liquor. Which in a roundabout way I suppose makes me think of one of the things in this beer world we don’t see much mention of: the alcohol, or the effects thereof.

I don’t know what I want to see in this area, exactly. I will note that today, while picking up alcohol at Costco, I saw that they had a keychain BAC reader—a portable breathalyzer for $20. I bought it, because it makes sense. I don’t know that I will incorporate it into my writing, but I will definitely be using it after drinking when I’m out. I mean, let’s be honest—we’ve all been in that situation at least once, where we shouldn’t have driven—but we did. Perhaps carrying a BAC reader should be required for anyone writing about beer and alcohol.

There are other issues that this Session topic covers, certainly. And I’m interested in seeing what other people write about. But for right now, it’s the alcohol on my mind.