There's never really been a time when beer wasn't popular.
The ancient Aztecs would use a regular beer ration to all citizens as an enticement to live in their newly-invented cities, for example. Nobody wants to live with other people - other people are awful. Beer is the only thing that can get you through a life surrounded by them. We've known this for millenia.
When prohibition gripped America by the liver for 13 long years, it wasn't whiskey or wine that people marched in the streets for; it was beer.
In spite of its longstanding place in the human heart, beer isn't just popular these days. It's fashionable, too.
This is bad news for a lot of reasons - it jacks up the price, for starters, as anything that's in vogue is bound to cost more. Even worse than the price inflation is the inherent pretentiousness that comes with fashion.
Until a few years ago, the only people who really cared about the minutiae of beer tasting were tedious old men with no teeth and cardigans, who sat in the corner of dark, local pubs. As popular tastes have shifted, however, a new breed of beer wanker has emerged. Young, condescending and somehow even less likeable.
Because of these people - the sort of people who pretend to earnestly care what species of hops are used in the ale they're considering potentially buying the smallest available measurement of - beers now have tasting notes in the same way wines do.
Much like with wine, these tasting notes are generally full of utter bollocks. I read a description the other day that claimed a beer had "notes of grass [...] and hay."
That's an awfully highfalutin' way of saying "This beer tastes of grass and slightly drier grass."
Regardless of the patent ridiculousness of it all, someone out there is getting paid to write this shit, and that proves to me that there are clearly too many people in the world.
The world has been suffering a population crisis for years now. Too many people for the planet, or, if we're being honest, not enough jobs for the number of people we have.
In the third world, there are too many people and not enough jobs to employ them, meaning these people can't earn a wage, can't provide for themselves or their families, and therefore end up starving. The fact that there's actually plenty of room on the planet to comfortably house and feed us all is irrelevant - the issue is an economic rather than a logistical one.
Rather than let this happen in the first world, we've developed a thriving bullshit industry. We can't have everyone out of work and starving, so we create jobs that don't really do anything - like writing tasting notes for beers and explaining how they taste like a lawn both before and after it's been mowed.
This is clearly an untenable situation. The population continues to grow, and we're running out of meaningless tasks to give people to keep them busy and thereby force the already-creaky wheels of capitalism to turn. How can we redress the balance?
I think the answer is Ebola.
In recent weeks there has been a severe outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic fever in Africa. Although not all the numbers are in yet, it seems to be killing about half of all the people it comes into contact with.
There's very little chance of it making its way to the UK - in news that shocked nobody, the only demographic that seems worried about that happening is UKIP voters:
Via YouGov.com
As I think UKIP are generally wrong about everything, not only do I think Ebola is unlikely, but I think it's not something to worry about. It's something we should be embracing.
With half the population gone, not only will there be better job prospects for everyone - no more beer tasters - but traffic will be a thing of the past. Parking restrictions, too. Hell, would YOU take a job as a traffic warden if you didn't have to? Now nobody has to!
Think of it. A world without beer wankers, traffic jams, parking tickets, queues at the post office, and a world that statistically won't contain at least one of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.
In fact, if half the human race is arbitrarily wiped out, it'll solve even some of our more esoteric problems. Oasis vs. Blur? X-Box vs. Playstation? Apple vs. Samsung? An arbitrary 50% reduction of the world would settle all of these kind of A vs. B debates.
All we need is a decent pandemic. We have the technology.
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