I pledged to keep the politics side of this site, the Views half of Brewsonviews, out of the Brews half. And I won't get partisan here. 
Just wanted to point out one fallout from the government shutdown that hits close to home to brew lovers.
When a brewer wants to bring a new offering to market there is a process he/she must go through. The product/label must be approved. It is a federal department naturally that does this. 
Typically it took them about 75 days to go through this approval process.
The federal agency in charge of this is running at bare bones capacity due to the shutdown. They are handling any requests that were already in house and going thru the process. But any new requests from brewers will sit and wait until the shutdown is over. And as you can imagine there will at that point be quite a backlog and that 75 day wait will be seen as the good old days.
As you can imagine this impacts your small craft breweries more than the big boys. There are small brewers who could be waiting months now for approval of products they were planning to offer for the holidays or the spring. Brewery launches are on hold costing the breweries thousands of dollars a month in some cases. And again for the small craft brewers that is real money.
Okay, I think I kept this rant non-partisan. But for those who love craft beers and the adventurous brewers who bring them to us this is especially galling. 
Contact your representatives, time to get the government back up and running. 

Okay so to be technically correct this is not a rant about short beer. Rather it is a short rant about beer. 
Specifically what has gotten under my skin is the sighting this week of Octoberfest and Pumpkin Ale offerings in our local package stores and grocery stores where brews are sold.
Come on gang it's the middle of August. It's still summer, time to be sippin those Summer seasonal brews or lighter more refreshing beers. 
Even for a fan of stronger, darker brews it is too soon to turn to the autumnal seasonals.  Of course I noticed Halloween costumes out on display in some stores this week so this may be a lost cause, just as it is now pointless to complain about Christmas wares being in the stores in October. 
But it doesn't mean we need to succumb to the madness.
I was already miffed at the first sighting of Harvest and Octoberfest brews from Sam Adams, Harpoon and others when I noticed a tweet today from @DrinkCraftBeer stating that craft beer cellar (craftbeercellar.com) is banning all fall seasonals until September. 
That's a good policy as far as I'm concerned. I'd extend it a few days and say no discussion or drinking of fall brews until after Labor Day.
We'll save a rant for how soon Holiday brews show up in stores for another time.