Bone Up Brewing Co.

In Which the Dust Settles

5/8/2024

Hi friends! It's Blog O'Clock again and we're back in the house with some fun times and some introspectin' so let's cut the shuck and jive and get on with it!

While full of lovely folks, this photo does not come close to representing the awesome turnout we had at Gentile on Friday! Thanks y'all for bringing the Bone Up thunder to the North Shore! That being said we love this photo and everyone in it <3 <3 <3

First on up is the release for our upcoming collab with Faces! The beer is an amber lager that they're callin' Goblin Mode (still can't believe they're calling it that) and it's gettin' released Friday May 31st and you should come hang out for the release! And if that weren't enough, there's also gonna be a show featuring Sundrifter, Benthic Realm, and North Star the Wanderer and that's also gonna be rad as hell so you should totally come out!

Come. Do. The. Thing.

And if you'll allow us to turn our collective gaze (further) inwards for a moment, we've been doing some introspecting, and also we're overdue for giving y'all an update* on The Aftermath or whatever you want to call it.

And part of the impetus behind all this self-reflection is that we're comin' up on what would have been another of our made-up holidays, namely Honey 'n Hops day. Now, this isn't one of our more well-known holidays - it marks the date of our first-ever brewday (specifically May 14th, all the way back in 2016) but we usually celebrated by going about our lives as normal and probably mentioning it on the blog if we remembered. Anyway, it's a time when we like to look back at how far we've come and think about the way forward and anyway let's get on with some Q 'n A style navel gazing:

So, uh, what is going on with... everything?
OK yeah that's a fair question given the fact that we really only talk about the cool collabs we're doing with our friends, and we don't even have any more of those on the books right now (other than the one release that I just talked about, of course). But in our defense, the answer to that question is extremely boring! The short version is "not much" - we tied up most of the loose ends that we can tie up, and now the only day-to-day stuff we really deal with is the occasional angry phone call from the bank (they are, to say the least, unhappy with us right now).

What about all your stuff? I thought you were going to be selling stuff off.
Yeah, it turns out we can't do that. We found out (via some threatening communications) that we need explicit written permission from several financial and governmental institutions in order to do that, and they're being a lot less cooperative than you might expect.

So what happened to everything?
In theory it's all still there, but we can't say for sure because we don't have keys anymore (we got to go to court over that last bit, which was a new experience). It's also entirely possible that the people who do have keys to that space have sold, scrapped, and/or thrown away all our stuff, but really all that would mean is that the bank would be mad at them in addition to being mad at us!

We said our goodbyes back in mid-March with our last can of Extra Naked. There's lots more pictures of the taproom's dark, damp carcass, but this is the only one I'm going to post because you will probably cry if I add more and this post is throat-lump-inducing enough already

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.

Thank you.

* Or at least as much of an update as we can, given all the lawyers involved
** I really don't know the lingo here. Basically everything that gets sent to the court, is what I'm saying
*** Don't worry, the site/blog isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so feel free to bounce around in the archives if you want some sweet, sweet nostalgia

In Which Things Are the Same, But Different

5/1/2024

Hello again! We're back at it to come tell you about the same two things we've been talking about for several weeks, and that's Collab Friendship Extravaganza Times!

And the first of those times is this Friday at Gentile in Beverly! We collabed up with them and brewed a tasty lil' table beer called The Same, But Different which is a nod to our perennial fave Extra Naked while also not being that at all. Anyway we'll be kickin' it in the taproom on Friday startin' around fiveish and we hope to see you there!

Next up on that ol' list is our collab with Faces which I'm pretty sure we're for real calling Goblin Mode! This one's a delicious-ass amber lager (fun fact: it was brewed by a dude* we met through that interbrewery kickball league we started six years ago) and we can finally announce that it's getting released on Friday May 31st! And what's more, the release party is gonna be a show! We've got Sundrifter and Benthic Realm and North Star the Wanderer on the bill and it's pretty much guaranteed to be a good time (how could it not be, with a lineup like that and a buncha tasty beers within arm's reach) and you should come hang out and/or rock out with us!

* He's their head brewer and not just, like, some guy.

In Which the Ol' Collab Train Make Stops in Beverly and Malden (Choo Choo)!

4/24/2024

Howdy do friendaroos! We're back to shout some more about those collabs what we got comin' out, so let's get with it!

First on up is next Friday (May 3rd) at Gentile (in Beverly) and they'll be releasin' up a pink peppercorn saison we brewed with them and since the recipe has a ...passing similarity to a beer that's near and dear to our hearts (namely Extra Naked) so it's gettin' called The Same, But Different* and we'll be up at their taproom hangin' out for the evening and you should join us!

And the next collab we've got comin' out is a collab with Faces and it's scheduled for later** in May and the beer's a tasty-ass amber lager that we've been calling Goblin Mode (and we think Faces is also calling it that, but we could be wrong there) and Faces wanted to do a show in conjunction with the release party because they're pals like that and we are mega stoked about the bands on the bill but you're gonna have to sit tight until we announce it (which should be, like, tomorrow, honestly) so keep them eyes peeled!

* Other than having a lot of the same stats - ABV, IBU, etc. - it's also got a very similar hop bill to Extra Naked. But also most of the recipe is a Gentile Original
** Way later. We were hoping to be able to use this blog announce that the release is planned for the 31st, but we don't have Official Confirmation yet so we gotta play it cool for now

In Which We Get Our NERAX On

4/10/2024

Oh hi! How are you? We're great, thanks for asking! We just thought we'd "pop in" to give y'all a "quick update" on all that "fun stuff we talked about last week."

And first on up is NERAX! It's the best dang beer fest around, and while it is indeed a mega bummer that this is the first NERAX in a long time that won't have Kelly on the menu, we're still hella stoked to be goin' there and we (Liz and Jared and probably some more of the ol' Bone Up Crew) will be there TONIGHT (Wednesday) bendin' our elbows and hangin' out and all that fun stuff, so come on out and support your local cask scene with us!

And speaking of "supporting" beer that's "local" we've got a collab release comin' up in a few weeks! We partnered up with our pals at Gentile in Beverly and brewed up a tasty lil' table beer dosed with a dollop of dry hops and a punch of pink peppercorns and I think we're callin' it The Same But Different and we're doin' a release event on Friday May 3rd and we'll be there doin' what we do (awkwardly staring at our feet until we get a couple beers in us, then getting into increasingly-impassioned conversations about cartoons) and you should come on out and drink some beer with us!

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!

In Which the Collab Tour Continues!

4/3/2024

Howdy friends! It's been a dang ol' minute since we've had any "news you can use" around here* but as luck would have it we've got several things to talk about, and talk we shall!

And first on that ol' list is a collab! Last week we ambled on over to see our friends at Faces and brewed up a sure-to-be-tasty amber lager! But it turns out that lagers take a dang ol' while to make, so it's gonna be a bit before it gets released but also that means we can put together a rad-as-hell release shindig! The fine folks at Faces wanted to pair the release with a show for Maximum Bone Up Vibes so that's exactly what we're doin', only I don't know if we're allowed to share the details yet so for now I'll just suggest that you keep them peepers peeled for something next month!

Like Smart People, we forgot to get a family photo on the brew day itself, so enjoy a buncha photos of Brendan's brewing kit!

And our second order of business is also a collab! This one's a bit farther afield in the far-off lands of Beverly and more to the point we teamed up with Gentile to make a dry hopped lil' table beer with a buncha pink peppercorns in it and it's gonna be a tasty treat! This one's gonna fly through fermentation a bit faster so the release party is penciled in for the very beginning of May but we'll keep you posted when we've got things locked and ready to rock!

This was seriously a blast. Thank you Paul for hosting us!

Oh! And! This is less "fun beer news" and more "a suggestion to come hang out at a fun beer thing we'll be attending" and that's Nerax! Nerax is pretty much our favorite fest ever (it's all cask beer, mostly session strength, and you can get full pours. And also it's in the Lithuanian club for some reason) and we'll be hangin' out and bendin' our elbows at that fest all evening on Wednesday, so come on by and hang out!

* We did briefly consider maintaining the once-per-week blogging schedule even if it was just to find a new way to say "nothin' else new goin' on around here" much like we did in the Old Days, but it turns out it was a lot easier to muster enthusiasm for that back when we had hopes and/or dreams.

In Which We Hang Out in Malden

2/28/2024

Hello again! We're back with another "quick one" because we "don't have much news" on account of how "getting a snippy email from the bank" is maybe not exactly "newsworthy" but that's all well and/or good because we've got some fun stuff to talk about! Or rather it's one fun thing and it's happening tomorrow (Thursday the 29th) at Idle Hands!

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?"

In Which We Dust Off Our Collab Boots

2/22/2024

Howdy friends! How are you? ... what's that? We missed a week last week? That doesn't sound like something we would do. A blog like this, with readership numbering in the high severals, has higher standards than that.

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.

In Which We Add to the Numerical Navel Gazin'

2/7/2024

Howdy do, friendaroos! We're back in blogtown with just a little bit more retrospectin' and navel gazin' for all y'all and by that I of course mean more numbers!

Number of times we drunkenly grilled out back: ?????
Number of times we fell asleep in the hammock out back after last call: 1

Wait, no, don't go. It's gonna be fun! I promise! And definitely not in a "trying to lure you down into the basement" sort of way!

Total number of floor joists that rotted out in our unit while the brewery was open: 5

Anyway, we thought it would be fun to total up some "lifetime achievement" type numbers only we didn't want to just give you lifetime totals for the numbers we come up with every year, so we spent literal minutes slaving over a hot keyboard to come up with some new takes. And that means that there are some things we would have liked to have numbers for, but they were impractical to figure out (most notably, things relating to ingredients are largely going to be missing. Ditto for stuff about events, that data is tough to track down) but hopefully some of this will be infotaining to y'all, so check out all these numbers we got!

Number of appropriate occasions to photograph our beloved Horatio plushie: ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Total amount of beer brewed, in BBL: 2,614 (that's 88,876 gallons for those of you that don't use the admittedly-insane units that brewers use)

Amount of time it would take you to drink all that beer, assuming a rate of one four pack per day: 444 years, 8 days

Month we made the most beer: July 2022 (58.9 BBL)

Number of barrels acquired: 55

Total number of different beers released: 390

Number of single hop beers: 37

Number of dog beers: 14

Number of wedding beers: 28

Number of beers named after children for some reason: 2

Number of band beers: 79

Number of flights poured: 48,152

Number of times the flight trays got replaced: 0

Number of individual 5oz pours: 15,816

Number of full pours: 203,734

Percentage of full pours that were Extra Naked: 12%

Number of cask pours (all sizes): 5,839

Number of growlers filled: 6,420

Number of crowlers filled: 8,918

Number of bottles: 15,090

Number of four packs: 12,799

Number of states distributed to: 4, including Massachusetts (also New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Colorado)

Longest brewday: 19 hours (our first and only same-day double batch)

No pictures exist from that day/night so here's a pic of that time we drank our shift beers out of fruit

Bands who got the largest number of different beers brewed for them: DnA's Evolution and Sunken City (six each!)

Number of different hops in the OG formulation of Wasted Life: 7

Number of different hops in the last batch of Wasted Life: 8

Number of hops that were the same between the last batch and the original formula: 3

Number of different shirts released: 72 (give or take, depending on how you're counting. But this number is probably a lowball if anything)

Total number of words written on the blog: 424,595
Number of words in War And Peace, a book famous for being very very long: 587,287

Number of hot dogs served: 13,844

Number of cows that were served entirely in hot dog form: 3.93 (it would take 236 hot dogs to bring that number up to an even four, and since this number only counts hot dogs sold we can pretty confidently say that if we count Staff Dogs we've crossed the four cow mark. Hell, Jared alone ate enough dogs to put us over the line)

Number of dollar snacks served: 55,995

Final number of hippos hidden throughout the taproom: 23

Number of different made-up holidays celebrated: 6

Number of people who accidentally got beer on the ceiling: 4 (note: this only counts people who admitted it/got caught. Some people, particularly John, almost definitely got beer on the ceiling and ran away without telling anybody)

Number of employees who learned, for the first time in their adult lives, that apricots are not just dried peaches: 2

Number of times Lilly escaped the office and knocked over an entire shelf of paint cans while we were interviewing somebody for a job: 1

Number of times Rocky escaped the office and ran all the way through the taproom just to eat a hot dog out of a child's hand: 1

Number of actual literal dumpster fires: 2

Number of times our back fence caught fire: one that we know of

Number of Bone Up tattoos: 25

Percentage of those tattoos that are on Liz and Jared specifically: 32%

Number of hot sauce collabs: 5

Number of whiskey collabs: 1

Number of songs written about Bone Up: 4

Number of marriage proposals in the taproom: 2

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

Number of commercially-available hop varieties that were named by Jared: 2 (technically only one so far, but we've been told the other one is in the works so we're counting it)

Also this isn't a number but we've been trying to come up with a list of the weirdest events that we've attended in a professional capacity and these are the ones we could remember: the interberwery kickball award ceremony (everybody got a trophy with "balls" engraved on it), that fest with chickens running around, the nautical-themed women in craft beer holiday bagel party, if this were pretty much any other brewery I feel like "beer fest at the zoo" would count as zany enough to include here (also the fest at the bird sanctuary that had a trivia component somehow, that one was fun), that craft beer comedy funeral, there's definitely a couple other ones I'm not thinking of but that's a decent start.

Give us another week or so to see if we can dig up any more. In the meantime, please enjoy this assortment of pictures we found while putting this post together

2023: A Year in Numbers

1/31/2024

Hi friends! We'd like to start off with a big ol' Thank You to everyone who came out to our shindig at Remnant last week! It was hella rad to see so many friends, and if doin' cool collabs and events is what it takes to get this particular party started then I guess we're gonna have to keep doing cool collabs!

Thanks Adam and Rick for the pics! We had so much fun we forgot to take any photos, so if you have any you'd like to share, send 'em on over!

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!

Production: By the Numbers

Number of batches brewed (total): 72
Number of double batches: 12
Percentage of batches brewed that were new beers: 57%
Amount of beer packaged, in gallons: 8,308

Number of flights that would fill: 53,171
Percentage of total volume actually served in flights: 5.5%
Amount of time, on average (assuming a 24/7 production schedule) it takes for Boston Beer Company to produce the same of beer we make in a year: 1 hour 26 minutes
Number of different beers packaged: 81
Number of new beers released: 65
Number of collaboration beers: 45

Number of wedding beers: 4
Highest number of beers released (or rereleased) in one month: 10 (tie between November and December)
Number of funky/wild beers released: 14
Number of "milkshake IPAs" brewed: 0, which is in fact the correct amount
Average OG of beer produced (in degrees SG): 1.054
Average ABV of beer produced: 6.0%
Highest ABV beer produced: Bone King (8.8%)
Lowest ABV beer produced: Key Lime (4.3%)
Amount of vodka, in gallons, it would take to make the same amount of alcohol we produced this year: 1,246

Beer brewed most often: Extra Naked
Number of Extra Naked batches brewed: 9 (three of which were double batches, also one had to get rebranded as Bad At Maths)

Ingredients: By the Numbers

Amount of hibiscus, in pounds, that was sacrificed to Henrietta this year: 40
Amount of hops used, in pounds: 360
Average hopping rate, in lbs/BBL: 1.30
Percentage of hops that were grown locally: 31%
Percentage of hops that were grown in Michigan, of all places: 32%
Number of hop varieties used: 39
Most used hop variety: Masscade (37#!)
Height, in feet, that you would need to grow all those hops on a single bine: 2,703
Amount of time, in weeks (assuming a 40-hour workweek), it would take you to pick all those hops by hand: 9

Amount of grain used, in pounds: 20,714
Number of individual grains that would be (approximate): 260,963,780
Percentage of grain that came from local suppliers: 12% (63% if you consider Delaware to be “local”)
Amount of oats used, as measured in bowls of oatmeal: 15,222
Amount of brown sugar used, also measured in bowls of oatmeal (but as a topping this time): 9,600
Amount of honey used, in pounds: 70
Number of bees it would take to produce that much honey: 38,920 (visiting approximately 140,000,000 flowers in the process)
Yeast harvested, in cells: 349,254,000,000,000 (plus another 19,716,000,000,000 or so from lab-grown yeast)

The Blog: By the Numbers

Number of words written in the blog: 69,778 (nice)
Number of pages that would fill in a paperback: 233
Least verbose month: July (4,320 words)
Most verbose month: November (8,081 words)
Top 3 most commonly used words in the blog (in order, other than "beer"): time, gonna, fun
Least commonly used words on the blog: play, percentage, comedy
Number of times we used the word "beer" in the blog this year: 475
Number of months "beer" wasn't the most-used word: 0
Number of times we managed to use the word "spooktacular" in the blog this year: 29

Taproom and Beer Garden: By the Numbers

Number of flights served: 2,964
Percentage of those flights that were served over Halloween weekend: 6%

Number of single to-go cans sold to people who definitely weren’t about to go drink in the parking lot: 95
Number of beers poured during our birthday weekend: 1,672

Number of dog costumes at our dog costume party: 15?
Percentage of those dogs that came with their own Instagram account: probably at least 50%

Number of times Landon was slapped in the face while working: only two, actually
Number of hot dogs served: 3,222
Number of cows it would take to produce that much beef: 0.92 (as in, we went through 92% of the beef you would get from a cow, in hot dog form)

Number of bands that played the Sunday of Horatio Day: 2
Number of bands that brought rubber chickens to play on stage the Sunday of Horatio Day: 2

Filed Under: "Holy Shit, How Did That Happen?"

Number of Horatio tattoos acquired: 11, plus one more Pulpo tattoo

Number of songs written about Bone Up: 3 (if you're being generous about how you're counting, which we are)

Beers Released in 2023

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

2023 Year in Review (Part Two)

1/22/2024

Howdy kids! We're taking a break from our regularly-scheduled "not having any events to tell you about" to tell you that we have an event to tell you about! More to the point, our pals over at Remnant bought some beer from us back when we could still sell beer and they'll be tapping it at their Bow Market location this Saturday! We (Liz and Jared) will be there for The Tappening at six and we'll be hangin' out until the (Bone Up) beer runs dry! They didn't buy a mega massive amount (a log of Civil Disobedience, a log of barreled El Pulpo, and a case of Critters XX, I believe) so if we really put our minds/mouths to the task we can totally kick all them kegs/cases so come on out and hang out!

Aaaaand back to our regularly scheduled programming, we're back with the Year In Review (But Only the Good Parts) and when we last left off we were about to get into...

...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!

Anyway, we also got to host our Musician's Marketplace in addition to our usual slate of rad events but really the whole summer was just leading up to The Big Day (and mildly panicking about whether or not there would be rain on The Big Day) in...

...August when we kicked off the month by hosting part of Somergloom (and, of course, releasing a beer by the same name to pair with the show)!

After that, we kinda "laid low" on the live music front up until the end of the month (partly because we got tired of cancelling shows due to rain, and partly because some of the bands we'd booked said they couldn't guarantee that they'd keep the noise level within the legally-acceptable limit). Anyway this was also the month that all of the regular Simpsons Trivia teams came to regret their own decision making (they had voted to make August's theme Season Thirteen and whoa man was that not a good call) and anyway pretty much all of our thoughts/attentions were focused on The Anniversary so let's just talk about that! In addition to the fact that we had kickass music all weekend long (and we brewed/blended nineteen friggin' beers to go with that music)!

We also had a whole buncha food friends come by and bring tasty eats and Heads Up did live screenprinting and also there were custom tie-dyed versions of the regular anniversary shirts and also a lot more tighty-whities getting shot out of a cannon than you tend to see at most shows (and the fact that our reaction to this was "yeah that's pretty much what we expected them to do" shows that we've made some excellent decisions about who we choose to spend our time with) oh and also we released an additional non-band beer on the anniversary weekend just for funsies and that's the beer that was collaboratively named by our mug club (who are great at coming up with large volumes of extremely terrible beer names, it turns out) which was known as Joining The War On The Side Of The Whales (or JtWotSotW if you want an acronym that takes longer to say than the full name) and anyway there's a reason The Anniversary is our favorite weekend of the year and the reason is that it's full of good times and friendship and a surprising amount of barrel-aged beer especially given how hot it is outside and it's a straight-up delight to get to hang out with y'all for an entire weekend!

Anyway, that's enough about the anniversary which means it's time to move on to...

...September when we started the month by sponsoring RPM Fest (which, if you've never been, is a pretty incredible metal fest out in central Mass) and then the week after that Adapter Adapter, Coma Hole, Eight Foot Manchild, and Trub all played a show for Jared's birthday (kidding, of course. It did happen to fall on his birthday, but it wasn't actually* for his birthday) and the day after that we got to have our Harvest Market, or at least we got to have half of it until it got canceled due to rain!

And since the weather started to cool down a bit, we got to resume all of our fun "it's not a million degrees out" activities like cask and sushi classes and also we got to release that collab beer that we brewed with CBC back in July (named Dada Processing, because it's very PoMo) plus we hosted The Office Trivia, Extra Hard Edition which included what is honestly a career-best stupid trivia prize.

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)!

Oh! And October was also when we released South of Italy which was a very special wedding beer (the wedding was in November, we just got excited about releasing the beer) on account of how the happy couple met in our dang taproom and that kind of thing just warms our cold black hearts, which is good because those hearts were gonna need some warming in...

...November when we really started to "pull out all the stops" in terms of having music in the taproom! We started the month off with some metal (The Outlourdes, Blast Shield, and Sordid Spell) and then later in the month our Powerviolence friends in Sexless Marriage had their dang ol' album release show in our taproom (also featuring Dwelley and Wire Lines, who are decidedly not powerviolence bands but they're rad nonetheless and we like shows with variety)(also the guy who put the show together - one of the ones who ran "Obnoxious Trivia" several months back - neglected to tell the sound guy that he would in fact be the sound guy for the evening, so that made things super fun for a little while) and then we had a big ol' hardcore show right after Thanksgiving (Billy, Throw, Unhinged, Impulse Control)!

We still managed to cram in a lotta cool crap around all that! We had another hot sauce day and then we had Pulpo Day (a weekend devoted to one specific imperial stout, which is way more fun than it sounds) and our band collab for the month was a chai spice brown ale called Three Of Cups (a collab with the black metal solo project Sacral) and somehow we had six bottle releases for Shitty Wednesday (if you're counting the two beers that got rereleased in bottles, and we are) and we managed to publish our annual Thanksgiving Beer Pairings for (I think) the entire menu which we definitely did not think we would do on account of how we realized it was about to be Thanksgiving like two days before the day itself and we released one last batch of Wasted Life which was pretty impressive considering the fact that we had almost zero of the ingredients the recipe calls for, instead going all "Ship of Theseus" on it and subbing in other things for pretty much everything in the recipe (and yet even ol' Wasted Life's most vocal devotees didn't notice, which means we're either really good at this or they're really bad at noticing things, and we're pretty sure we know which one it is)...

... 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.****

* ...or was it? (No)
** OK fine I lied about not going into it more. In short, even though we weren't violating any laws or the terms of our permit, the city changed the terms of said permit because they "received some phone calls to code enforcement." Also of note, there's no official record of any complaints to any department (we submitted a FOIA request). Anyway, we're still more than a little unhappy about this, but also we're used to this kind of stuff from Everett.

*** The bands that played Horatio Day were also some of our favorite bands that have played here in the past. We've got a lot of favorites because we've worked with a lot of cool bands.

**** "Of course we'll stay in touch after summer camp!"

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