God I know I don’t even need to repost this for you guys since pretty much all of us have Firstwefeast.com set as our homepages, but they just released a SHOCKING STORY letting the public know the seedy underbelly of covetous perma-virgins who are hoarding vessels of sugar water in their midwest basements, behold:

http://firstwefeast.com/drink/craft-beer-mules-exposed/

In case you had some pangloss hope for trying some rare beers in the future, this cautionary tale lets you know ”

The circulation of rare craft beers is rigged, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Here’s how the sophisticated game of hoarding and reselling really works.”

Dear Diary: today my boner was cracked squarely in half and the waves of disappointment washed over me like an Herbal Essences commercial. We are led by a beer hoarding expert “SAM” down this rabbit hole of intrigue.

New traders get all wet when someone brings up a massive whale like that 2012 Cherry Rye ohh fuuuuu-

Like an unsuspecting Scientologist, poor Sam was led into a tawdry beer trading den of iniquity by TIM, who wanted to get deep inside of his cellar:
“Tim then asked Sam if he might be interested in joining his “muling group.” Sam didn’t know what that meant, but agreed to sign up and investigate.

“You don’t sign up,” Tim informed him. “We decide to invite you.”

So that is how this works in the modern age.  Long gone are the days of equitable changes, I want this, I will send that, now it is a meretricious affair like the Skulls but with heavy breathing, screen print T shirts and trilbies.

As if this complex structure of manchildren was not unbelievable enough, you should see the manner of UNRESTRAINED JAPERY that occurs in these private writhing mounds of beer sodomy:

“Language on the group’s Facebook wall is typically crass, and most non-beer talk drifts into the sexual. Several guys in Sam’s group enjoy posting nude pictures of women, often holding rare beers between their bare breasts.”  The erections are visible and encouraged.

Once I read this article I felt myself being ground between the machinations of capitalism and the human condition. If you are not in the elite cream invited into a private beer group, you can spin webs of precum in your studio apartment thinking about the RARs that could have been.

There are far worse ways to fuck up your life than beer trading.

BUT HOW DO THEY GET SO MANY BOTTLES THO?

” Often, a guy like Jack is friendly with his local brewery and doesn’t have to waste time waiting in a snaking line with all the other shnooks; he simply loads as many cases as he needs into the back of his Buick. At worst, Jack is going to have to call in some favors from friends and family to help him mule more beers. For other operatives, it might mean putting an ad on Craigslist to get a few warm bodies,”

This article not only exposes these laudable and praiseworthy tactics but also gives a nod of clemency to the top tier dipshits who engage in these Varsity Beta tactics. I can only pray his Buick was an Enclave or something else sponsored by Shaquille O’ Neal. This is the state of beer affairs today and, even more laughably, this is the current state of beer journalism.  Coming from this lukewarm pile of used condoms that passes for a website, that says a lot.

If you think things are bad now, wait until the day laborers currently hired to stand in line unionize with the Central American cartels.  Soon you will be buying adjunct stouts on the east side from a 5’3 Honduran dude wearing a Ducktales shirt.

Looking forward to 2015, the year beer trading becomes a commoditized sack of camel fetuses like the Whiskey game or worse, the post-menopausal realm of Wine traders.  With a tip of the hat being delivered to BCBS predators, secondary values being quote in tandem with $4$, and dipshit 2k13 tickers who have a mountain of past releases to catch up on, we can expect to see people attempting to maximize every. single. bottle.  In the near future.

Secondary markets were previously frowned upon, now foodie assholes have infected the trade game like anal fissures and everyone is being stung with their “cash rules” mentality.  The muling groups are largely an extension of that iconoclasm and serve to deconstruct the “AW SHUCKS” home townie vibe that beer has enjoyed until scarcity and demand have ramped things up to this Katniss Everdeen model of people pounding buttholes for the scantest taste of succor.

I don’t even want to touch upon the subject of EdwardFortyHands and the recent seismic cataclysm of recapping and refilling limited releases.  There are specific spheres of the underworld reserved for those people just below “secretly transmitted hep C to your wife.” But it is indicative of the rising cost of doing business in a hobby where all the Zumba bodies want that full swole, but don’t want to push any weight.

If you think this shit is bad, wait until 2016 when all the Pappy dumbfucks from BevMo converge upon the pre-diabetic beer world in what is being anticipated as THE PERFECT SHITSTORM.  I cannot wait, because at the nexus of satire and reality exists this fringe world of deeply obsessive introverts who practically write the material for DDB at this point with their hilarious IRL antics.

Time to load a Motherless dot com brower window and put in some work.