Just when you think collaborations make muddled beer... just when you couldn't wait for beer by committee to be the next big thing... we give you statistically averaged beer recipe formulation:

“We’re asking them as a group to help us design a beer,’’ Koch explained Friday. Through a special application on Facebook, Sam Adams fans will collectively produce a recipe. “The parameters are things like the color, the clarity, the mouth feel, the yeast, the malt, the hops, so there's almost 2,000 different outcomes. Imagine what a really great beer would taste like, and then slide each of those six scales to design the perfect beer, and we'll take the total of all those different beers and then we're going to brew it.’’

Yum. I am pretty sure that even in my darkest moments I haven't ever imagined this new odd PR trick as a way to truly master the making of dull beer. Taking social media add the power of averaging and, voila, dullness in a glass. And roll it out at SXSW just to make the thin veneer of hipster-ism seamless.

Neato! Crowd sourcing!!! The wide-leg jeans of this decade. Thanks for bringing it to brewing, Sam Adams. Can we stop associating this brewer with craft now?