The reason beer is expensive to some people like us – low income earners? You really want to know why?

Well, put the blame on this mushrooming culture of sipping beer from a serviette-wrapped bottle. I mean, how do you order a drink to your personal specification –that is, a chilled lager, then proceed to hustle the wait staff to commandeer serviettes with which to handle your wet and sweaty bottle?

Then again, if a drink is too cold for your tough, rough fingers to handle, then how in the heavens does your throat and digestive tract handle?

No, no, no! don’t even begin to convince your sorry self that this is swag. In case you didn’t already know, this habit is just as gross as the practice of sipping a beer from a straw.

So what should people drinking yoghurt and mango lasse and ikinyomoro juice use, if beer drinkers still hang onto those straws?

And do you even begin to realize that, apart from the tax man, you are the other reason beer ain’t cheap no more for ordinary folk like me?

Recently I conducted a random mini survey amongst my not-so-well-behaved drinking cronies and their sentiments with regards to this issue were unanimous; that all people employing straws to imbibe beer should be forced to pay Rwf 200 extra for the ‘privilege’.

Alternatively, they chorused once more, this sad lot should be confined to those dingy back rooms in bars and nightclubs, those stuffy, airless cubicles where empty crates of beer and broken bottles and drunks are confined.

Not to forget this other lot that has the audacity to punch a Primus/Mutzig with a Fanta Citrous in broad day light! Just how do you do it?

What about the bar lay about you always bump into in a bar, holding a beer bottle which they then proceed to flash in your face to indicate that their drink is about to end, meaning you have to offer them a refill, even before ordering your own drink?