What started as a Twitter post and conversation turned into a full-blown phenomenon that started today: Flagship February, which reflects a simple premise—appreciation of a brewery’s flagship beers.

Created by Stephen Beaumont and Jay Brooks, it couldn’t be simpler: drink and enjoy a flagship beer. Of course there’s a bit more to it than that; this is cribbed from the website:

There are, by some estimates, in excess of 22,000 operating breweries in world today. At a very conservative count of only a dozen brands per brewery, that makes in excess of a quarter million different beers being sold around the globe, plus, of course, the multitude of special releases that for some breweries number in the hundreds per year.

That’s a lot of beer!

While we, like any sane beer drinker, are thrilled by this.

Increasingly, it seems to us that what leads people to drink a beer is less whether or not it’s good than it is whether it’s new or, better still, rare. While this is not necessarily a bad thing – new brands and styles keep it all exciting, after all! – what sometimes gets lost in the special release noise this produces are the beers that paved the way for the remarkable global beer market we presently have at our disposal, or in other words, the flagship beers that got us here.

And so, we created #FlagshipFebruary.

The idea of Flagship February – the hashtag, the website and the movement – is not to try to shore up sales of the flagship beers of various breweries – that’s the job of the marketing and sales divisions of those breweries.

Our thinking is that flagship beers have much to teach new drinkers and remind older drinkers, and if they fall off the radar so far that they disappear completely, we will all be that much poorer for it.

Stephen Beaumont, flagshipfebruary.com

So during the month of February, seek out some flagship beers from breweries young and old and give them a try (or revisit them, if you haven’t had them in awhile). Of course since much of this is social media driven you should also post about the beer on Twitter (or Facebook, or Instagram, or what have you) and tag it with #FlagshipFebruary.

I’ll be drinking a few this month, and will be writing more about this in the coming weeks as well. Cheers!