Lately, I have found myself surfing a great many brewery web pages. And for reasons that escape me, a large number of them seem to want to know my age before they allow me to learn about their products. Enter the wrong numbers and I find that I am instantly transported to disney.com or Yahoo. Just like that.
So what is this fascination with my date of birth? There is no law that I know of which mandates that a person must be of a certain age before they might legally read the word "beer." So why is it that so many breweries want to make sure that I am 21 before they allow me access to their site?
Presumably, these brewing companies are trying to demonstrate how responsible they are by provoking underage visitors to lie about their birthday in order to get past the splash page. And I suppose that buried deep in some advertising code of conduct there probably is a clause recommending that they do exactly that. But why? We aren't talking about drinking the beer, just reading about it. And the last time I checked, reading was pretty closely connected to education.
If I were the responsible head of a brewery, I would welcome visitors under the legal drinking age to my site. I would want to teach them that beer is not a societal evil, but a social beverage of moderation that can be enjoyed equally with a meal or on its own. I would want to tell them that getting drunk is not all it's cracked up to be and that they should drink beer for the pleasure of its taste rather than the effect of the buzz. And I would want them to learn that there is much more to my beers than just alcohol.
But instead, these so-called responsible breweries tell teenagers that they are not even allowed to read about beer until they reach an arbitrary age at which they are deemed legal drinkers. Which no doubt accentuates the mystery of alcoholic beverages and potentially encourages them to indulge in the "forbidden pleasure" in manners much less than moderate. It is, in a word, ludicrous.
So I say to all visitors from around the globe who younger than the legal drinking age in your country:"Welcome to the World of Beer!" Enter, read, learn, enjoy. Find out all you can about this delightful beverage we know as beer. Talk to your parents about it, and if they are cool with the idea, have a beer with them. Humans, even young ones, have been drinking beer for many a millennium, and to my knowledge not one civilization has fallen to waste because of it.
And to you parents, perhaps this holiday season would be a good time to sit down and talk about alcohol with your kid. Over a beer.
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