My son Porter has a subscription to Mad Magazine that we started for him a few years ago, when he began picking it up at the grocery store and really liked it. I remember devouring every issue when I was his age, too. The new issue (#540 August) came the other day, and features an illustration of Donald Trump on the cover with his head popped open and Mad Magazine’s mascot Alfred E. Neuman jumping out on a spring, like a jack-in-the-box. Which seems appropriate, frankly, but that’s another story.
Inside the issue, he brought my attention to a two-page piece on “New Olympic Events that AMERICANS Are Sure to Win.” These included “Synchronized-Selfies” and “Marathon TV Binge-Watching.” But the one he made a point to show me was the “Craft Beer Taste-Test Time Trials.”
You know you’ve got a perception problem when Mad Magazine is making fun of you. It’s a shame that enjoying good beer has been so perverted both from within and also from outside, in the form of the big brewers taking pot shots at a lot of core aficionados’ behavior.
Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been into ‘craft’ beer from day one (and into good, well made beer well before that) and I still think that the MAD piece does seem to pretty accurate in it’s lampoon of how silly the whole thing has been getting.
I’ve actually witnessed some characters like that at my local bar (one that has been serving ‘craft’ beer almost exclusively since the 1980s) …and in a couple of cases, they were characters who were even _more_ comically pretentious.
I’ll probably going to go to Staples this weekend with a copy of the magazine to have the cartoon blown up to poster-size so I can display it on the wall of my home-brewery (just to give myself the occasional poke in the ribs if I start taking the beer geekery too seriously myself).
But with regard to perceptions and speaking honestly, it seems as though any perception problem with regard to craft beer could actually get worse, if some of the scores of new small breweries popping up don’t start delivering some better quality. So many of them seem to be opening their doors too soon–well before the products they make (and sell for generally higher prices) are ‘ready for prime time’. :-/