I feel like there was a lawsuit involved. Is there a lawsuit? What's the deal with that?
There is! It's inadvisable for us to go into detail, BUT it turns out that most of the stuff that gets filed in (and/or submitted** to) lawsuits is a matter of public record? We didn't know that until pretty recently. So if you were to, say, go to masscourts.org and search for the phrase "Bone Up" in the Middlesex Superior Court, then you could read a whole bunch of legalese about how we are mad at our now-former landlords (and even more legalese about how they are mad at us). But that's... not moving quickly. We've been told that it's on a fast track or something, but the current phase (which has been going on for several months already) lasts through the summer I'm pretty sure. So yeah, it's a real "no news is no news" kind of situation.
​
So what's this all mean for Liz and Jared?
Well, we've slowed down on planning collabs because we're both finally trying to reënter society and we don't really know where that will take us (job-wise or geographically), which, in a roundabout way, means that we're straight-up out of relevant stuff to talk about here on this ol' blog.

Wait, is this the last blog post?
Maybe? I didn't mean for it to be when I started writing it.*** But also we're nearing the ten year anniversary of our first-ever blog post, and we do love our milestones around here.

Holy shit, it's been ten years?
Yeah, I just had to go back and check. We were so full of hope and ideas (and beer) back then, and we really did manage to build something incredible. I'm glad we got to share it with you.

AND. Speaking of collabs. We've also got a collab in the works with our friends at Faces! I don't think we've announced the release party yet because this one's got a few more moving parts (as in, there's gonna be a show involved as well) but you should probably try and keep Friday May 31st free just in case we *do* end up having this shindig on the date that I think we're gonna. Anyway the beer itself is an amber lager (hence the longer turnaround time) and I can't remember if we came up with a name for it but I do know it's gonna be tasty as all heck, so get them tastebuds ready!

​For those of you who "missed it" last time, we brewed up a collab with Idle Hands* and it's almost ready to drink! They took the recipe from one of our Old Classics, namely Key Lime White, and they adapted it to their own brewery/techniques/things they had lying around** and we're pretty much hella pumped about it so we're gonna be hangin' out at the taproom all evening for the release party and Bonetown will be there too if you need some eats and it's gonna be a fun ol' time and you should come by and say hi!

* And for legal reasons we should once again mention that Idle Hands is responsible for the name of the beer and the label design. Our official position is that they wanted to take the idea behind "Shut Up Kelly" and take it up a notch, but even that is purely speculation. 
** Industry Insider Secret: a staggering amount of recipe design is driven by the question of "what do we already have on hand that we need to use up?"

But enough about all that. We wanted to let you know that we did a collab with our friends at Idle Hands and it's getting released next friggin' week! They wanted to put their spin on one of our recipes so we sent them the recipe for Key Lime (which incidentally is available as a homebrew recipe for those of you who want to brew your own at home) and they took that recipe and did a bunch of Brewer Things to it and it's in the tanks now but it's getting released Next Thursday (the 29th) so we're gonna head on out for the release party and hang out all evening and you should come join us! They're brewing up a big ol' bunch of it so we definitely won't run out of beer in an hour this time (and if we do I'll be impressed and more than a little grossed out) so anyway yeah come on out!

Oh, and for legal reasons we should also mention that Idle Hands is solely responsible for the name of the beer and all associated label art. Any use of our name and logo is not meant to suggest an endorsement of any ideas that anyone might want to sue us over, er cetera. 

Number of full pours: 203,734

​Number of different made-up holidays celebrated: 6

Number of times Grace went to Europe, met the mayor of Spalt (a region famous for growing hops) and gave him a crowler of Shut Up Kelly!, of all things: 1

Anyway, without anything else of real substance to report on (at least not yet) we're just gonna get right into the third and final part of our 2023 retrospective (right on time as usual, running several weeks after everybody completely stopped talking/thinking about the previous year) and that's The Year In Numbers! And if you ain't been around this particular block before, the idea is pretty simple: we think back on the previous year and come up with as many silly stats as we can (and doing so this year gave us some ideas for a final Lifetime Numbers post that we'll try and get up next week. It'll be shorter/much less comprehensive, but there's a couple fun ones in there) and anyway let's get to it!

Parentheses indicates the rerelease of a seasonal/rotating/flagship beer.

January: Chalk Outline, The Hourglass, Critters 19, Happenstance, High Voltage, (Passion (Fruit) Project)
February: (Shut Up Kelly!), Fisticuffs, Horatio's Reserve, Sticky Fingers, Fool's Gold
March: Master of Extremity, (Extra Naked), Caustic Abomination, Shade Queen, Collateral Moshing, Boneheads III - Cerberus, (Joybringer), Light of Day
April: Supergroup, Patio Weather, (Fixation on Red Ale), (Henrietta)
May: Tom's Fault, Synthetic Dreams, Believe in Yourself, We're All Doomed, Ales of Demonic Possession, Cheeky Bastard
June: Django, (Stick The Landing), Bone King, (Key Lime White), Main Squeeze, Synhoptikon, (The Airness), This Is A Guilloteenagers Beer
July: Enigma, Blood Lightning, (Seven X's), RPM, Artificial Reaper, Joining the War on the Side of the Whales, Somergloom
August: Pale Glow, Brew Famine, Undercurrents, Cathedral of Trees, Hazy Spacey Jam, Bad At Maths, Kingslayer, God of Night
September: Unholy Water
October: 700, (Ginger Spectacular), The Blurst of Times, Calico, Extra Funky, Ginger Hootenanny, South of Italy
November: (Barreled El Pulpo), (El Pulpo), Sam's Elven Explosion, (Blue Manic), Three of Cups, (Joyrider), (Wasted Life), Biere de Krampus, Tears of Krampus, Close Encounters
December: Civil Disobedience for Losers, Critters 20, Critters 21, Critters 22, Critters 23, Critters 24, Critters 25, Critters 26, Critters 27, Wolf Pup

...July when the Anniversary preparations really reached their apex (we have learned, through extensive bitter experience, to plan way farther ahead than we think we'll need to) - beers were being released left and/or right, the merch started showing up (including - finally! - the sweet dimple mugs that we've been trying to get for the anniversary since pretty much the first one) which means that in a weird way this was the first month of the year "without" a band collab since most of the beers we brewed were for the anniversary. We still had our monthly band hangouts, and it was pretty much rad as hell because it was all bands that were scheduled to play at the anniversary and the "beer release" for the night was Blood Lightning, which we brewed for Blood Lightning, but I think we'd already brewed the beers for several of the other bands that were in attendance. Anyway we had a bunch of other cool shit planned for July but this was the month when it started raining every weekend (and, somehow, exclusively on weekends which was a real "insult to injury" kind of thing) so we had to cancel a bunch of stuff, including the RPM Fest preparty that we were super stoked to be hosting (in fact, one of the few non-anniversary beers that we released in July was for that show). ​

But anyway, July wasn't all rain and gloominess - that was also the month that we got to go out to CBC to brew Dada Processing which was a pretty huge deal for us personally since their brewmaster is somebody that's Kind Of A Big Deal as far as professional brewers go! ​

And I know I said I was gonna stick to Only The Good Stuff in this year-end wrapup but I do feel the need to mention that it was around now that The City Of Everett ordered us - without cause - to stop all of our outdoor live entertainment. I'm not gonna get into it any more** than that, but it did kinda "set the tone" for the next few weeks; for instance, the show we'd planned with Death Ray Vision (to go along with the release of Unholy Water, our collab beer with them) got turned into a Band Hangouts night with pretty much zero notice, and also we had to seriously reconfigure a show that we had in...

...October when we had our first indoor show! Sure, the circumstances behind this show moving indoors were maybe not the best, but we were able to scramble together all the fixin's for a pretty rad time and we got to enjoy a buncha cool acoustic performances from Stephen Brodsky and Adam McGrath plus Marquis Lavoie, Hall Monitor, and T. Bloodhound and that honestly paved the way for a bunch more indoor shows in the weeks/months to come so something something silver lining! ​

Also in October we started up Mug Club Round Two (the first of many things in the taproom whose main impetus was "fuck it let's party") and we released our seven hundredth batch which we creatively named 700 and - following the (self-declared) success of our 666th batch, we decided to take that recipe and make it even more unmarketable (and when your starting point is "golden mild," it doesn't seem like there's much farther down that you can go) and speaking of tweaking beers to (at least in theory) make them less marketable, we also released Extra Funky which was Extra Naked but fermented with Brett C (credit where credit's due: this was Ben's brainchild) but the "unmarketable" aspect of that one kind of flopped because it ended up being one of the best beers we've ever made and while we're on about our brewers we should also mention that Macon got his paddle! The Bestowing Of The Paddle is an important tradition (to Jared) wherein people who have worked in production for a while get their own wooden brewing paddle - usually one that's built with a particular purpose in mind, but also that building has been implemented by somebody who is maybe not the world's best woodworker (i.e. Jared) - but anyway this paddle was made by somebody competent (Jared's dad, who built... most of the things at Bone Up that are made of wood, honestly) and anyway I got way distracted talking about that paddle so let's move on! ​

October also means we get to do all of our spooktacular Halloween stuff (and our decor honestly doesn't need to change much) so we did our annual Dog Costume Contest where the real winners are the people who get to look at dogs in costume all day and also we did our Beer and Candy pairings, only we did a slightly stripped-down version of them because literally everyone that works at Bone Up hates the free-for-all approach that we used to use in the past (turns out that if you make production employees come up with a chocolate and non-chocolate pairing for every beer on the menu, and then ask the FOH staff to find said pairings for hundreds of build-your-own flights, you're gonna encounter some resistance) but anyway it was hella fun and there was still much candy to be had (except the Twizzlers, nobody ever wants those)! ​

... And anyway that wall-to-wall craziness is only set to increase in...

...December when honestly it really started to hit home that this was gonna be our last month, but we were still. Determined. To. Have. All. The. Fun. Dammit. And have fun we did! We held Horatio Day a month early and this was the first year that it had live music! Twice! We got to bring in a bunch of friends to play live music (The Weisstronauts and The Electric Heaters on Saturday, then DnA's Evolution and The Guilloteenagers on Sunday) and several of the bands wrote songs just for us (well, The Guilloteenagers wrote a song about us a couple years ago and they've been playing it ever since, but that's even better?) and that's not even the main point of Horatio Day, the main point of Horatio Day is barrel-aged beer! And also cake. But mostly beer! We'd been pretty much bottling constantly since we started prepping for Shitty Wednesday and that showed no sign of slowing in December, especially since our Horatio Day featured pretty much all of those big ol' boozebombs we'd been bottling up. ​

And after Horatio Day Liz and Jared hosted a night of Bone Up Trivia which was honestly mostly just an excuse to tell anecdotes about fun and/or memorable times at the brewery over the years, and then since we were pretty much entirely out of merch at that point we had Heads Up come back for another round of live screenprinting which overlapped with yet another show (Beneath Purgatory, Maidenhead, Dyhanna, and Vantablack) and then we had another show the day after that featuring a bunch of our favorite*** bands that had played here in the past (specifically Sundrifter and North Star the Wanderer and Ballast and Blue Manic) and at some point during all that madness we released, like, a jillion Critters beers because a) we didn't have time to make more blends, and 2) everything we had on hand worked really well as a single-barrel release (we moved away from single-barrel funky beer releases a few years ago because we tend to use small barrels, which means we would blow through different funky beers really quickly if we didn't combine them into larger blends. On one notable occasion, we went through an entire batch in a day and almost nobody on staff got to even try it) and also we released one last funky blend because we wanted to squeeze in one more wedding beer and that beer was Wolf Pup! ​

And then bringin' us right to the End Times we auctioned off all the hippos that had been hidden around the taproom (and also some art) and despite the fact that all of our knowledge of auctions came from "seeing fictional auctions on TV" it went fairly smoothly! Assuming, of course, that "attendees threatening each other with physical violence" fits within your definition of "smoothly," of course. ​

Anyway that was but a taste of the chaos that was to come at our End Of Days shows, with Glacier and Girih performing on Saturday the 30th along with Dregs Liquid Light Show (and holy hell was that an incredible show), then Goblet, Viqueen, Karate Steve and Graviton completely tore shit up on Sunday the 31st and we used the word "bittersweet" approximately ten million times over the course of those last few weeks/months, but that's really the best way to describe it at the end of things. We got to spend the weekend with all the friends we made over the years (including a few who came in from out of town just to see us) and we got to hang out and have fun and we were able to ignore the dark cloud hanging over our heads because getting together and doing cool shit is the reason we do this and it's the reason we've always loved doing what we do. ​

I've said goodbye to this brewery a thousand times and I feel like I've been writing different versions of the same damn epilogue on the blog every week for months, but I really can't overstate how lucky we are to have gotten to do this at all. We've made a ton of great beer and we've hosted a lot of fun events and most importantly we've just met so many great people - it's not always easy to meet people who are Your Kind of Weird, but we found a way to attract the right kind of weirdos (and confuse the crap out of a lot of other people in the process) and at this point all we can say is that we're glad we got to know you, and we hope we still get to see y'all around.****