2016 is the year that we saw more and more breweries stray away from bombers and embrace the once-eschewed canning lines of garage libations past. For some reason, when you put a hoppy beer in a pint can, beer nerds with already maladjusted priorities, then reprioritize even harder.

Enter the dark days of 5 hour lines for 2 four packs of DIPAs. Four years ago this would sound like some Mojoverse shit, an alternate bizarro timeline where people give away Barrel Aged stouts for canned IPAs, made on the east coast no less. “In this reality, Roggenbiers and Dortmunders are the most coveted and men cannot obtain jobs in the female-dominated brewing world!” they quip.

Enter the chairs:

Tired Hands has had so many phantom chairs that they had to make a new rule that you cannot drop a chair down prior to noon. Now Ardmore has this surreal landscape of chairs without bodies, almost an avant garde performance piece as a testament to the detached consumer. The people who attend releases to flip them for other releases have become unstuck in the medium. Neckbeards who know neither neck nor beard.

This is almost on part with the old Jester King “no costumes” rule where avaricious beer consumers go to hilarious lengths to skip lines and obtain extra allotments. But fear not, the line has been self-policing:

I can only assume “Phantom Chair DIPA” will be followed by “Tattle tALE, Passive AgGrisette”

As with any budding regulation, new industry spawns around it, and those capitalistic hucksters in Pennsylvania will not let any capitalistic enterprise go Untappd.

The free market economy, goods and folding chairs changing hands, the wheels of progress. To think we used to savagely buy hoppy beers at the grocery store, like some knuckle dragging cicerones, whittling out crude mash paddles from driftwood.

The next logical step is regulation against empty chairs, which will create a market for a chair proxy, which if he is picking up beer for another proxy, will create an endless feedback loop of cognitive dissonance. Dudes who work at Best Buy, standing all day, to pay other dudes via Postmates to sit all day, to obtain beer, that the sitting dude wont drink, to send to another Enterprise Rent-A-Car employee, who stood in his own line, who will eventually share them, with people who have no appreciation for the machinations that occurred to get some two row and motueka into their glass.

THE AGE OF CHAIRQUARIUS IS UPON US.