BY JOEY SWEENEY

Allow me for a moment to speak my truth: There is so much bad beer in this world, and overwhelmingly, it is made by microbreweries. This beer — valuable to many of us, as often as not, for reasons of self-regard more for than how it tastes — is often sold to us as being somehow virtuous, or more virtuous than more mass-produced beers. And sometimes, there is truth in this: Small businesses, in general, have more of a stake in producing things ethically, of not making garbage and not being shitty to humans because they exist within existing communities, and their reputations in those communities are everything.

But that doesn’t make any of it taste good, and it doesn’t make the culture of microbreweries any less susceptible to evil, whether it’s the full-throated variety or the lite version or even a 30-minute IPA version of evil. I would put forth, for instance, that the culture of microbrews facilitates more mansplaining than all other beverages combined, including wine, and that’s saying something. I would like to further assert that microbrews enable the same kind self-delusion that, say, shopping at Whole Foods does, filling your gullet with the same type of lies about your outsize role in saving the planet, your community and yourself. I would even step over the line and say that the world of microbrew/microbro culture in the United States lives inside a tent of white smugness so rife with its own farts that it’s actually a hot air balloon, currently situated right over Philadelphia. From up there, you can see where the developers have made friends with the restaurant people and are creating, as we speak, one more place that’s so much like every other place that one day soon, it will begin sucking in many of the ways that all the other places do.

With that in mind, let me be the first to say it to you all: Happy Beer Week, everybody!

Beer Week opening tap this year is at The Fillmore. More info/Facebook invite here.