You know that thing where the time machine doesn’t drop you exactly where you expected? We departed Auckland late Sunday evening and arrived in Los Angeles not quite early enough Sunday afternoon to continue our planned journey home. In other words, we missed our connecting flight and did not enjoy the next 20 hours all that much. It would be obnoxious of me to complain after three weeks in Aotearoa (New Zealand), so I won’t. The country is spectacular.

I pass it along only to explain why I had extra airport time, some of which I used to catch up on reading. That Was The Beer Week That Was will not return until next week, but I wanted to give a nod to a couple of beer visiting OGs and include links to two that may or may not be related.

First, Chris O’Leary visited this 300th brewery and VinePair wrote about him. That he is racking up these numbers pops up every once in a while on Twitter or elsewhere and somebody comments that surely nobody else has done this. But Dan Forbes and Dave Gausepohl have, so I feel obligated to point to a story I wrote about Beer Dave more than seven years ago.

At the time he had visited more than 3,400 breweries. He is closing in on 5,000 now. Forbes, who Beer Dave he calls a mentor, visited more than 6,000 before passing away earlier this year. Those started going to breweries when you couldn’t knock off 50 during a long weekend in Chicago. Forbes and his wife also visited every county in the United States.

Second, are these two circumstances related?

– Jeff Alworth writes about craft beer “crapping out”: “Let’s start here: I think craft’s malaise is a thing. I don’t see this as a temporary downturn. Craft beer is suffering an identity crisis and it won’t snap back to being the cool kid’s drink anytime soon.”

– Alex Murrell argues “that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”