The first Friday of each month brings together beer bloggers around a common topic under the banner of The Session. This month Literature and Libation hosts, giving us the topic “Surviving a beer midlife crisis”:

Recently, I’ve found my interest in said hobby waning. The brilliant luster of new beers and new breweries looks now, a few pounds heavier and a bunch of dollars lighter, more like dull aluminum oxide.

The timing of this topic is impeccable, even if my post about it is not. I should have written it last week; whoops.

But: two weeks ago, when I wrote about reading Microbrewed Adventures? I came to that topic after a night of searching, grasping for any topic I could think of to write about. And I kept coming up blank.

I am also going through a beer midlife crisis, though I didn’t want to admit it because “being excited about beer” is basically at the heart of the whole of my job here at CBW. But as far as beer writing: hasn’t it all been said before?

I’ve mostly stopped the Music Box series because I was boring myself. Beer travel is fun, but it requires you to travel. Also, if I’m being completely blunt, the beer tourism I’ve done lately (which I haven’t written about, so don’t read into anything) has left me underwhelmed at best.

The beer I’ve been drinking has been fine. It’s fine. But “fine” does not inspire one to take up quill and parchment and get to writing. There have been a handful of beers in the past year or so that have made fireworks go off in my mouth, but the mundane truth is that most of them are enjoyable, not revelatory. I drink, I like, I do whatever else I was doing at the time.

This is natural, though. My enthusiasm and excitement over beer has ebbed and flowed over the years. It’s currently in a… whichever of those is the low one. The same goes for all my other interests, the difference being that I haven’t committed myself to writing a blog post about anything else every week.

So: what’s the solution? For me, probably, time. Ride out the slump and wait for my interest to pick up again. Try to get out of my comfort zone when picking out something to try. And keep on talking to people who are as excited about beer as I want to be.

(an aside: I’m actually getting very excited about the future of CBW, but didn’t feel as though that should count as this isn’t about self-promotion)