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What it is, though, is a fashionable veneer for drinking too much. And people have found a way to make it A Thing or Their Thing, thereby making it OK to drink.

It is very much a different thing to sit on the couch in your backyard and suck back eight PBRs in an evening than it is to stop by the craft brewery for a handful with your friends on the way home. One is recognized, rightly, as a problem. The other is trendy!

That taverns are now breweries, that beer is now a revolting artisanal experience, that you take tours of the brewing setup (that look literally the same in every brewery everywhere) is a sure sign that something is attempting to be better than it is.

Whether you’re getting greased on Coors Light or something so hoppy it makes you thirstier, it’s all the same in the end

Whether you’re getting greased on Coors Light or something so hoppy it makes you thirstier, it’s all the same in the end. And some 40 per cent of Canadians are higher risk drinkers; that pint you have in the brewpub is actually worth 1.5 “standard drinks,” so it’s easy to hit the limit of three drinks per day for women and four per men that leads you over the threshold of risky drinking.

Look, smoking a cigar instead of a pack of cigarettes has a touch of class about it. That doesn’t make it good for you. Whether you’re sculling a $1.50 can of beer at home or a $10 pint in a brewery doesn’t make any difference, either.

Younger generations would do well to remember that.