Stopping to smell the flowers, err, hop aroma

Have you ever noticed that everybody nowadays seems to have lists and lists of stuff they’re actively checking-off  to feel like they’re, you know, accomplishing those ever important “life goals”?  There’s the pile of books you just have to burn through because everyone says that they’re each, respectively, the best thing since Snooki’s book*; there’s your “Bucket List” (which is currently the length of a elephant’s trunk and growing), that compilation of everything you simply must experience before your number comes up and it’s time to exit the Ride of Life at the back gate; there are all those movies you have to see and all the places you need to set foot in just so you can say you were there; all the stupid little repairs you need to do around the house because that dumb toilet keeps overflowing…

Well, I guess that last one is kind of important.

That’s not, of course, to say that having and using a list or lists of that nature is a bad thing.  It’s certainly not.  Anything that helps us get the most out of lives is, on balance, beneficial.  Still, sometimes it seems like we’re mostly racing around to make sure we experience ALL TEH THINGS but in our haste to check them off, we don’t actually take the time to enjoy or appreciate them.  We’re like Clark Griswold trying to get his family through the Louvre just before it closes.  And that, my friends, is a sadness.

The same can be said of the world of craft beer.  There’s a metric mammoth-ton of good craft brews available these days, and with so many out there, it presents a problem to your average craft beer-lover.  Namely, how do you sample them all?  That issue, together with the philosophy as a whole, has given way to what some people have recently referred to as “The 2-oz Culture”.

That culture is the topic of a post I wrote for Hoperatives.com today, and it includes references to several other pieces across the web discussing that same thing.  If you find yourself on often on a craft sampling spree, but maybe feel like something might be missing, or if you’re just curious about the underlying question of the compulsion to speed though experiences as part our culture today, maybe click over and do a little light reading?

OH! And speaking of Hoperatives, now’s the time to get your registration in for 5B 2013: Believers in Better Beer Bites, and Blogging Conference.  5B is a cozy, casual conference that will take place this year on Saturday, February 16th at the Cincinnati Convention Center.  It’s put together in conjunction with Cincy Winter Beerfest, and focuses on, as the name suggests, better beer blogging, food blogging, and well, just, um, blogging blogging.  I’ll be there, and if you do any kind of blogging, you should be there too.  Oh, and did I mention that registration includes tickets to Cincy Winter Beerfest?  Yeah, so register already!

Pud’n

*I kid, I kid.