Diary: Take your IPA Day and shove it.

I believe it was on Thursday last week that it was revealed to me. Someone, somewhere had declared it to be IPA Day.

The identity of the governing authority behind such utterances remains unclear, but there it was. I've long been contemptuous of "Hallmark Holidays," wherein PT Barnum is regularly proven right, and consumers will spend money chasing cards and gifts on First Cousin Day, or Deceased Pet Turtle Day, or whatever else has been dreamt up by a marketing firm as an effective means of pinpointing the location of fools, and relieving them of spare cash.

Now, for all my rampant and escalating cynicism, I can't honestly say that IPA Day as a concept is quite this wretched. I like IPAs, albeit it less so than in the past. At the same time, if all beers are IPAs -- as increasingly seems the case -- then we must return to the timeless wisdom of "stamp out and abolish redundancy," because IPA Day becomes the "craft" beer equivalent of Mass Market Lager Day.

I said as much on Twitter, and not content to dip a tepid toe into the Coors Light, went even further: Notions like IPA Day are hokum, to which I am grievously allergic.

Naturally, no more than an hour passed before one of my own employees posted on Facebook about celebrating IPA Day with NABC's Progressive Pints, and immediately I was exposed as some variety of hypocrite, and left to dangle from a gallow's pole of my own construction.

But not really, because pesky concepts like freedom of speech exist, even within  NABC. If you want uniform, monolithic thinking, then go visit RateAdvocate.

In the final consideration, what remains is fairly basic: Hallmark Holidays annoy me tremendously and are likely to continue doing so, and when every beer is an IPA, IPA is meaningless.

This is why I'm here today to announce the Session Gruit IPA Revolution. 

We'll brew a session-strength Pale Ale without hops, substituting a range of botanicals sources primarily in Indochina, hence the acronym. We'll sell a half-pint in a half-empty full sized glass, into which the drinker will add a bottle of Q tonic water ... you know, for bitterness.

Voila!

Have I won a Pulitzer yet?

The saddest thing of all is that in the time it's taken me to write this diary entry, someone's already pitching the idea to AB InBev.

Maybe Goose Island will do it.