new friend
if you go to a bar by yourself, you can always ask the bartender 'whats the swan draft like?' and if they are a bartender worth their salt, they'll pour you a thimbleworth and then you can say 'ooh!... yick!! yucky yucky yucky, i'm not sure about that! hmm. what about the great northern? original and.. super crisp. why is there two? whats the difference?' and if they try to explain you can just look confused until they pour you a thimbleful in two more glasses. and to show you are serious about the art of craft beer, you can ask for a glass of water to cleanse the pallate between the two; and really, you can keep doing this with every beer on the tapline, working right to left until you reach the guinness. some people say this is bad manners, but how is it bad if no bad comes of it? worst case scenario, you get a midi-worth of beer for free, and lowercase scenario, at the end of that twenty minutes you shake one of their hands and ask them for their name, then best case scenario, you have a new friend.