For the 103rd Session, our host will be Natasha Godard, who writes MetaCookBook. For her topic, she’s asking us to look around and acknowledge the elephant or elephants in the room, whichever one you’ve finally noticed, or as she explains it in her announcement for the September Session, “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.

Pour us a liberal amount of The Hard Stuff.

So start noticing the things that are right in front of you, but aren’t acknowledged or talked about in polite beer society, and let us know what you think is the hard stuff that we should bring up and face. Maybe we’ve been looking in the other direction and just didn’t see it, or maybe it’s staring us in the face and we just chose to ignore it. Either way, to participate in the September Session, leave a comment to the original announcement, on or before Friday, September 4.