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[quote=Anonymous]At some point, alcohol became a hobby in the US. I mean some people have always pushed it this way, but it didn't become very widespread until more recently. Like there's always been that guy who is just very, very into Scotch or the person who is obsessed with wine, but I feel like only within the past 20 years or so did this become less niche and more of a widespread thing.

I personally noticed it during the rise of microbrew beer. Before that, people generally only drank a few kinds of beer and none of it was very good. So being really "into" beer was not really an option for people. But with microbreweries, people started getting really into the whole story of how beer is brewed, the different varieties, etc. It was like the wine snobs of the 80s only much more widespread because beer is a lot more accessible. There are breweries in pretty much every city, even the small ones now. You can live in like a suburb of Cleveland and still have easy access to literally hundreds of really good quality beers, plus be a short drive from a dozen microbreweries... it just became a really easy hobby.

And then that spawned a wave of micro distilleries, which democratized having liquor as a hobby, plus you had all these celebs get into selling their own labels of tequila or vodka.

As usual in the US, it all comes down to a kind of hyper commercialization of alcohol as a product that is supposed to reflect who you are as a person. IPAs are the pick up trucks of the early 21st century.

But now there's a backlash and lots of people are quitting drinking altogether, or dialing way back. Who knows, maybe we will get a true teetotaler movement a century after the last one. It all goes in cycles.

But yes: "alcohol" is a dumb, weird hobby and people who obsess over and talk endlessly about drinking are weird and boring.[/quote]

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