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" &amp;quot;Amazeballs. It&amp;#039;s a chocolate chip muffin in a glass. #beerclub #mellowmushroom&amp;quot; Like getting that crinkled card in your wallet hole-punched every time you order another fro-yo, Mellow Mushroom also has a loyalty program. It&amp;#039;s pretty simple: get a swipeable card, drink different beers off their lengthy menu every time you visit, and earn prizes like an engraved pint glass along the way. This Atlanta-based and hippy-inspired pizzeria offers a beer club at all of its 150 restaurants...except the chain&amp;#039;s two North Carolina locales, where the Alcohol Beverage Control Board has just banned the practice according to the state&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;incentivizing your guests to drink&amp;quot; clause. Why do gubment meddlers continue to think humans could only possibly use alcohol for nefarious reasons? It&amp;#039;s sad how prohibition in miniature still exists in so many states, whether that means you can&amp;#039;t fill a growler, or purchase beer on Sundays, or on an election day, or cold beer ever.  If you&amp;#039;re a maniac with some time on your hands, scan North Carolina&amp;#039;s liquor laws, many of which read like satire. You&amp;#039;ll find the state has a 15% ABV cap on beer, that happy hours are prohibited, and that up until 2011 &amp;quot;use of profanity&amp;quot; was totally fucking illegal in Tar Heel State bars. (Surprisingly, no word about whether you have to proffer a toast to Coach K every time you have a drink within the state&amp;#039;s borders.) The problem is, as with most draconian rulings related to alcohol, that most state governments don&amp;#039;t seem to understand how, or why people drink in the year 2014. Have these people even been in a restaurant or bar recently?! Guess what, they&amp;#039;re all pretty much designed around &amp;quot;incentivizing&amp;quot; guests to drink, especially considering alcohol has the highest profit margins of any comestible in the joint. Then again, people don&amp;#039;t need much incentive to drink nowadays, especially when it comes to us beer geeks. People that drink craft beer don&amp;#039;t just drink it to get wasted (or win a free beer club trinket), we drink craft beer because we enjoy the taste and immense variety. I&amp;#039;m not so naive and idealistic to claim craft beer drinkers don&amp;#039;t like to get drunk--we do--but our main pleasure is in trying lots of different, delicious beers. I&amp;#039;ve always liked beer club type promotions and wish more bars had them. Back when I was in college in the late-90s, I discovered a campus bar, Faegan&amp;#039;s, had something called &amp;quot;Beer Tour.&amp;quot; Every Tuesday for a special discounted price, you were offered the opportunity to drink unique beers from around the world, getting your &amp;quot;passport&amp;quot; stamped with each new entry you poured down your gullet. After fifty beers, you got your name on the wall amidst decades of past alumni tipplers. As a young dope who had up to that point subsisted on an alcoholic diet solely consisting of Long Island Iced Teas and Milwaukee&amp;#039;s Best, Beer Tour was my impetus toward exploring the exotic world of &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; beer...or at least beer not sold in cardboard thirty racks. Even as a twenty-one-year-old, the incentive wasn&amp;#039;t the slightly-cheaper Tuesday beers--though that didn&amp;#039;t hurt--and it certainly wasn&amp;#039;t the chance to get my name etched onto a plaque--though I still visit it with pride every time I return to campus--no, the incentive was to learn more about something that had just begun to interest me. A decade-and-a-half later, I&amp;#039;ve never looked back. I&amp;#039;m sure the same is true for many beer clubs members in North Carolina, or at any of the other Mellow Mushroom beer clubs throughout the country. People join the club not to get wasted on the cheap, but because collecting new beer experiences are these people&amp;#039;s hobby in the same way collecting new dumb laws to enact are clearly most North Carolina politicians&amp;#039; hobby. Look for North Carolina to ban free bar pretzels and peanuts later this year as soon as the geniuses at the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board realize they keep incentivizing customers to order another round. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a28067/harshing-mellow/>