I have no prescriptions. Just food for thought.
I've had a beer while out to dinner with my family (and carrying). I'll have a beer at a friend or family member's home while carrying; more than that is rare (carrying or not), and I lock the gun in my safe in the car beyond that point.
I think there are at least three issues with regard to carrying and drinking:
*Legal obligations and liability (already covered ad nauseum)
*Actual impairment of judgment/capability in a self-defense situation
*Perception by public while open carrying
Re: the second point, life is calculated risk. I am willing to risk a beer in public. Sometimes. This is not actually that different from before I carried. Being in public generally makes me pretty uncomfortable anyway (which some of you probably already know).
Re: the third point, open carriers may be "just exercising our rights," but like it or not will get additional scrutiny. Some will look askance at someone having a beer with a pistol on their belt, no matter how irrational that might be in light of the much deadlier set of car keys in most everyone's pocket. It may be that "normalizing" open carry includes normalizing open carry while doing everything that other responsible adults do, but for some that is probably a bridge too far.
I'd be the last one to tell someone else to what extent they ought to exercise any of their rights, but I suspect that in most of the places I frequent, drinking with a gun on my hip would cause more harm to the perception of open carrying than the beer is worth to me (admittedly, not that much). Your mileage (and favored drinking environments) may vary.
As a side point, though, I also carry at home most of the time. Aside from being where I keep all of my favorite people and things, this is where I do 90% of my drinking. I've noticed that since I started to home carry, I drink less here, too. Whatever the legal niceties may be, I find that I want to be just as unimpaired in my own home as I am in the open, for pretty much the same reasons: just in case. I rarely have more than two drinks in the course of an evening now. I don't think my quality of life has decreased.