It's a strange, twisted world we live in where discovering your favorite beer is available at a knockdown price can lead a man to a fit of the fearful vapors. But I will admit to coming over all fearful and vapory when a mate tweeted me the other day that he'd found a carton of Grolsch at his local bottle shop for the knockdown price of 40 bucks.

Why did this good news so unsettle JB you ask? Because the beers in question were not being sold in Grolsch's magnificent swing top extra-large bottles. They came in stock standard stubby sized little tipplers sealed with nasty metal caps. This is not good people. Not good at all.

I've been worried about the encroachment of the new, mass-market style Grolschies for a while now, ever since I discovered the old porcelain pop tops had been replaced by plastic ones, a minor crime against humanity which, I believe, was simply the first stage in softening us up for the planned extinction of the old lever action bottle altogether.

Now don't get me wrong, I love Grolsch as a beer. It is a particularly fine drop on a brutally hot and humid day such as we had yesterday, but there can be no denying that a large part of its appeal lies in the eccentric design of the bottle's cap; a design which makes it especially suitable as pool beer because of enhanced resealability.

It's the bean counters of course. I blame those bastards for everything and with good reason. I find it significant that the appearance of modernist codswallop such as smaller bottles and metal caps postdates the sale of the Grolsch brewery by the DeGroen family to the multinational SABMiller group, one of the largest bottlers of Coca-Cola products on the planet. For wherever that foul black nectar shall flow, bean counters are sure to follow.

Please God let me not be alone in my distress at this. Let me not be a lone voice in the beer loving wilderness. Speak up my fellow Instruments. Let your voices ring out. Cry freedom and give us back our swing top, extra-large beer bottles.