This opinion piece in The Australian today speaks as much to the state of beer as the state of writing in newspapers in Australia. This extended quotation of James Jeffery's writing is remarkable both for its coarseness and its plainness about the moronic nature of the cult of globalized ice cold macro-lager that is at large in his land:

...danger awaits if your tastebuds haven't been completely cauterised and you want to branch out and drink something that might make your tongue dance while laying waste to your brain. Stand by for the local piss prefect to accuse you of drinking yuppie beer or worse still, boutique beer, which makes it sound like it's got more than a touch of handbag about it. Talk about the glories of kolsch, porter, bock, pale ale or Trappist booze and you may as well say you've joined the local eunuch guild. But the masters of the beer universe aren't exactly a bunch of blouses who sit around with their noses and pinkies in the air. The Germans are responsible for a whole spectrum of beers of weeping complexity and subtlety, all brewed according to a 500-year-old set of commandments, yet still managed to invent the Beer Hall Putsch. The English are behind such towering achievements as Theakston's Old Peculiar and the perfection of the soccer riot. The Belgians invented beer that inspires poetry yet goes off like a liquid depth charge. And the Czechs, who gave us the unparalleled gift of pilsner, are probably the greatest brewers of them all, yet still found time to manfully shrug off fascism, communism, Neville Chamberlain and a shortage of vowels.

Remarkable. Rude yet accurate. Thick yet inspiring. We should speak so plainly in all things that affect us, not just the pleasures of life including beer but all those things that bear upon us, that restrict or do worse than fail to enlighten.