FOMO

By Soo (@Soo_Jane)

It’s an exciting time to be a beer enthusiast, awesome core ranges, new breweries, festivals, collabs, limited releases and access to beers from far and wide. We are most definitely spoilt for choice. There in lies a problem for me, it’s the Fear of Missing Out.

I definitely think FOMO could be linked to personality traits to a point. It’s Friday morning I’m sat in the hairdressers and I’m getting anxious that I’m going to ‘miss’ a couple of beers at Indyman. I’m there for THREE sessions. I’m going to try some boss beers, it doesn’t matter, but I’m itching to leave. (Edit: I don’t remember half the beers I tried at Indyman but they were generally awesome)

As we are all Manchester based, there is just such a wealth of amazing beer, venues, breweries & shops. For us I suppose the FOMO started with the Cloudwater DIPA V series. Once a month popping in the brewery for a bottle, can or draft of the latest DIPA. As we are all pals, we’d also then get them for each other to make sure we all got to try, then they might accidentally get them too, so we’d end up with super fresh beers in the fridge for longer than they should. I would have very sore arms nipping everywhere in town to pick the latest fuss up for everyone, once running out on my lunch to purchase 10 x 750ml bottles from a brewery a mile away….only to then see them around for a while! What was I caught up in?!

It seemed all of a sudden there was a lot of fuss about. We had Verdant and Deya who exploded on the scene for us. Sean and Sarah immediately went to Beer District in Buxton (which is very excellent) where they ended up with the entire Verdant range each (we lived together at the time) a couple of hours before we were due to head out on a beery birthday to have a load more beers.

But that’s great right? We love visiting bottle shops, having a good chat with the folk in there, perusing labels and all the while supporting independent businesses. It’s a favourite pastime and something we try to budget for, though never end up buying just a couple of beers!

Then we have Other Half, The Veil, Bissel Brothers, The Alchemist etc coming across the pond with some banging beers that we have never had access to before. Justifiably the cost of these will be more than we would ordinarily pay, but we wouldn’t want to miss our chance to try them, and we obviously have try them all. Would we normally have 6 beers on a Tuesday. Probably not.
Through these events mind, we have met more lovely folks in real life and had some very fun times (the Buxton TTO after the Pilcrow Summer Beer Thing a firm favourite). Manchester Beer Week was one long week of fun, and yes, with the sheer amount of things going on the FOMO did rear its head again. This was especially prevalent with those of us who have no flexibility in work…those kids wont teach themselves!

We have definitely had less beer trips of late, which is almost how we really laid the foundations of Beer More Social. It’s nice to walk into a pub in say Sheffield and see what’s local. I guess we are in this Manchester bubble and we haven’t had to look
further than whats on at beer fests and in our fave haunts in Manchester.

So we are going to try to arrange a little new year bottle share (somewhere?!) so we can try some of these beers we simply had to buy at the time (got my eye on that Portent of Usher!), start planning trips and days out focusing on both the beer and the
SOCIAL and be happy to try what is on.

Am I being ridiculous? Probably. First world problem, well yes, but it is something we have talked about A LOT with the sheer amount of collabs and exciting releases this year. For me perhaps is time to get sensible and suppress that FOMO, but with beer festival season in full swing it’s unlikely to be any time soon!