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Comment by dmourati | Hacker News Reader

What about those of us regularly consuming 22oz "bombers" of wonderful 10% beers like Ballast Point Victory at Sea?

I feel like the lower alcohol content session beers are working against you. More time drinking, more raw volume, and more time spent going to the bathroom.

I suppose a session beer would make a nice choice for drinking in the workplace. You could have 1 or 2 and still function at your job. Beyond that, I don't get the allure.

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> I feel like the lower alcohol content session beers are working against you. More time drinking, more raw volume, and more time spent going to the bathroom.

I won't speak to the other two points, but "more time drinking" in conjunction with less time actually being drunk (which honestly sucks) is what many people are optimizing for, because going out drinking is about the socializing far more than the drinking, but it isn't "cool" to participate without an alcoholic beverage in hand.

There are so many reasons why someone wouldn't drink, even beyond just recovering alcoholics. There are various types of medication that react poorly with alcohol. A person might be trying to lose weight. Or maybe they're a pregnant women. Plus, if you're out as a group, someone needs to be the DD. If one's group isn't understanding and accepting of people not drinking, then maybe one needs to find a new group of friends.

Or you can avoid the question with a tonic water or similar. Looks like a drink, but isn't.

Okay, but I seriously wouldn't want to be in such a group to which I had to hide the fact I wasn't drinking. That's pretty messed up.

Seriously. I love me some beer, but would not tolerate a group that expressed disapproval of a refusal to drink.

Bah, I was afraid that throwaway part of my comment would end up getting the focus. My point is just that most people are somewhere in between "want to get drunk" and "don't want to drink at all" when they're socializing, so drinks optimized for that make a lot of sense.

"want to get drunk" and "don't want to drink at all" is literally the entire spectrum, so I think it's safe to say that "most people are somewhere in between" :P

Well, no, the alternative perspective is that most people are at one of the two extremes, which seems to be common, hence the idea in the comment I originally replied to that "more time drinking" is "working against you". My point is very simple: I think lots of people want to spend time drinking (while socializing) without getting drunk.

I like them sometimes because they don't rely on alcohol to cover up off-flavors created in the brewing process by some less-than-perfect breweries. It's surprisingly common, especially from particularly popular microbreweries who start cutting corners to fill their demand out of their limited production capacity.

"More time drinking, more raw volume" is part of the point of a session beer. The idea is that some people want to drink at a pace where the can continue for a several hours, drinking several beers, and not end up wasted.

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