It's easy to make friends at a bar.  Beer Universe even has a Bar Tab feature that allows you - out of gratitude to someone on the site who has steered you in a properly hoppy direction or, perhaps, opened your eyes to a new style - to "owe someone a beer."  Unfortunately, it's a symbolic gesture only.  We want you to be able to express yourself as you might at your local watering hole, but state commerce laws prevent us helping you follow through with the gift.  We hope you do occasionally direct a beer in someone else's direction when you're out - you'll be amazed at the goodwill it engenders - but there is one type of beer tab we hope you never run up, and it doesn't come from being overly generous.

It comes from greed, specifically in the form of somehow allowing yourself to be convinced that stealing beer is a good idea.  It's not!!  Still, beer theft keeps showing up in the news, over and over again:

• This March, three men ran out of a Seattle-area Safeway with a few cases of beer, running over a 74-year-old woman and causing a serious head injury in the process. 
• From mid-April to mid-May, a family network of beer thieves raided $7,000 worth of 30-packs from Circle K convenience stations in Tempe, Arizona, before being caught. 
• Salem, Massachusetts, nearly fell prey to the same crime just after 2 AM one night in mid-August but was assisted in recovering the beer and capturing the underage thieves by local policemen. 
• A man in Brooklyn, New York, got so upset last week at the rising cost of beer in a Marlboro Mini-Mart that he tried to start a fight with employees and broke a plastic partition. 
• Also just last week, two men broke the glass windows of a Dalton, Georgia, liquor store and proceeded to steal beer and cigars around 4 o'clock in the morning.

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