'Fraidy cats. The world is full of them. BBADD has no time for them. Yes, beer bloggers should be against crime and dumbness that leads to real harm but 'fraidy cats are not worried in the same way. They want to sweat the small stuff... but then try to make it look big like this:

The UK government is looking to cut beer glass-related injuries, which cost the tax payer £100m a year in police and NHS bills. The Home Office has asked the Design Council to develop a replacement for the conventional pint in order to reduce the 87,000 glass-related injuries reported each year. The move forms part of the Home Office’s ‘Safe Sensible Social’ drinks campaign. The project, which is considering a range of options including polycarbonate, will reveal its finding in December under the banner ‘Design Out Crime’.

Now, I'm no fool. I've met many who were stitched up in the emergency room after or even during a night on the town. While I call such people thugs these days back then they had a name - my pals. One actually never played the piano again after falling and not having the sense to drop the beer on the way down. I actually have met only one person who used broken glass as an actual weapon - she was quite a piece of work. But BBADD can't get into creating social policy around this sort of fringe. It needs to focus on the real issues. Better to work on the cause of rubber carpeting and heftier glassware than worrying about keeping the shivs from the freaks. The freak will always find a shiv. And the law already locks up shiv users.

No, that is not what this is really about so back to the quote above. Notice the coy co-mingling of concepts. It says being safe means stopping crime... even though only a small percentage of such injuries would be crime related. What is up? Is it because the story is published in Plastics & Rubber Weekly? Surely not. Yet just as surely there is a place for promotion of positive social drinking in all of this, a place to stake a claim as to what safe really means - and if BBADD is to mean anything surely it means sensible drinking. Hasn't craft beer been trying to say that for years now, that there is no other drink that better encapsulates ‘safe sensible and social’ like craft beer?

This is the perfect opportunity for beer drinkers, beer bloggers and beer brewers big and small to back a common sense program. What would it mean? It is interesting to note that there is a wide opportunity for public buy in to the program which defines (at page 7 of this policy - warning pdf) sub-harmful drinking as having somewhere more than 28 and less than 50 units a week for men. We all know that these unit things are iffy but 30 units is about ten full pints of 6% beer a week. You would think that there is a constituency in the craft beer community drinkers and brewers to support a public program of healthy beer consumption at that level or less. Apply sensible BBADD math skills to make it 17 pints at 3.5% and it makes even more sense. As far as I'm concerned, that is good BBADD policy.