It's coming out on Friday and it's... honestly pretty much exactly what you'd expect (also if you've had Skeleton Key in the past then you've got a pretty good idea of what this one is all about), which is to say that it's delicious! Come drink some!
Thassright, our friend Liz L'Etoile from Four Star Farms (which, if you'll recall, is the farm where we get most of our hops) is gonna join us and drink some Wasted Life and some Treasure Hunt and chat about hops and maybe say a brief eulogy for Rakau and we think it's gonna be a buncha fun and you should join us!
Grab your tickets here: Drink Some IPAs!
Grab your tickets here (on sale until Thursday afternoon): Virtual Hell Night
Tickets to any session will get you four bottles, plus a food pairing (all of which is intended to be shared by at least two, but we're not gonna judge if you wanna go whole hog), plus a sweet souvenir glass, plus we'll be (virtually) gathering and gabbin' about the beers and overall just havin' a whole mess of fun! So if any of that sounds like your cup o' tea, read on and check out them deets!
I'm kidding, of course - our friends over at Brato have whipped up a sumptuous-sounding array of wild game dishes for your snacking pleasure and it's gonna be a tasty time!
Tickets here: Session 1
We don't have the cheeses themselves fully locked down yet, but the biggest hurdle is that every cheese pairing we've tried with these beers has been, at the very least, completely delicious. But that all translates to good news for you (and also us), so you should come check these cheeses out for yourself!
Tickets here: Session 2
Tickets here: Session 3
And then once that's over they will probably take a nap on account of the three straight days of drinking on camera.
Tickets here: Session 4
* OK fine, it's Jared's favorite post to write because he thinks that "numbers are fun" (which is some Reading Rainbow shit, but here we are)
** If you were wondering, we do actually research these and make a bunch of spreadsheets to make sure everything is as accurate as possible. Our fact finding strategies range from "emailing people who are smarter than us" to "google searches, sometimes even clicking on two results for a consensus," to "counting."
Brewing by the Numbers
Number of double batches: 27
Number of new beers brewed: 35
Number of batches of flagships brewed: 38
Number of batches of non-flagship recurring beers brewed: 17
Number of batches of "unreleased" beer made for aging and blending: 7
Amount of beer packaged, in gallons: 11,715
Number of flights that would fill: 74,976
Percentage of total volume actually served in flights: 8%
Number of new beers released: 51
Number of collaboration beers: 13
Number of wedding beers: just one, right before people were told to stop gathering in groups
Highest number of new beers released in one month: 7 (tie between June and July).
Largest number of beers available at one time: 26
Number of bottles filled: 5,029
Number of different beers canned: 37
Total number of cans: 49,075
Average ABV of beer produced: 6.15%
Highest ABV beer produced: 9.5% (Rebello Fellow)
Lowest ABV beer produced: 4.3% (Key Lime)
Amount of vodka, in gallons, it would take to make the same amount of alcohol we produced this year: 1,801
Number of funky/wild beers aging at the beginning of the year: 14
Number of funky/wild beers aging currently: 23
Number of Wasted Life batches brewed: 14, (four of which were double batches)
Number of key lime pies that could have been made with that lime juice instead: 384
Number of actual key limes it would take to produce that much juice: 7,373
Number of beers named to make fun of one of our employees: at least one, that they know of.
Number of beers in our "blithely pretending the world isn't ending" IPA series: 4
Ingredients by the Numbers
Average hopping rate, in lbs/BBL: 1.63
Percentage of hops that came from local suppliers: 46%
Percentage of hops that came from Michigan, of all places: 7%
Number of hop varieties used: 28
Number of those that were new to us: 10
Most used hop variety: Rakau (88#!)
Height, in feet, that you would need to grow all those hops on a single bine: 4,628
Amount of time, in weeks (assuming a 40-hour workweek), it would take you to pick all those hops by hand: about 15, plus a couple extra days
Number of individual grains that would be (approximate): 375,275,479
Percentage of grain that came from local suppliers: 25%
Amount of oats used, as measured in bowls of oatmeal: 17,721
Amount of brown sugar used, also measured in bowls of oatmeal (but as a topping this time): 14,006
Amount of lactose used, in pounds: 56
Number of Lactaid pills you would need to neutralize all that lactose: 1,954
Number of bees it would take to produce that much honey: 204,052 (visiting approximately 734,000,000 flowers in the process)
The Blog by the Numbers
Number of pages that would fill in a paperback: 171
Least verbose month: March (2,724 words)
Most verbose month (not counting December with its 6,575 word year-end wrap-up): November (5,569 words, which means that December's year-end wrap-up was longer than any given month's worth of bloggins)
Top 3 most commonly used words in November (in order): beer, suggest, pairs
Number of times we used the word "beer" in the blog this year: 628 (478 if you don't count variations like "beers" or, apparently, "beeradjacent")
Number of months "beer" wasn't the most-used word: 1 (January, when the most-used word was "number." Can't possibly imagine why
Number of times we managed to use the word "spooktacular" in the blog this year: only 14, because we didn't realize that it was October until like two days before Halloween
Snacks by the Numbers
Percentage of those served to Demarco and friends: honestly, probably like 5%.
Amount of hot dogs sold, in pounds: 377
Number of cows it would take to produce that much beef: 0.86 (as in, we went through 86% of the beef you would get from a cow, in hot dog form)
Amount of sugar consumed by each member of production when figuring out the first half of the beer and candy pairing menu, as measured in Pixy Stix: 90
Number of boxes of Girl Scout Cookies we ordered at the beginning of the year: 240
Number of times "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" was played in the brewhouse: not enough. Probably only like a hundred.
Number of people on staff who learned for the first time that apricots are not, in fact, dried peaches: 1 (how does this keep happening?)
Press by the Numbers
Number of times we made the news for something good: 0 (that's at least partly our fault, it turns out The Globe blocks your email if you send them press releases with titles like "We're Gettin' It In The Can!")
Beer Garden by the Numbers
Number of outdoor seats at the end of the year: 54
Number of pallets used to make the walls of our beer garden: 19
Number of old labels used for the "wallpaper" in our beer garden: 1124
Number of days we had to whip up a beer garden out of what is essentially garbage: 3. That's some Cinderella shit right there.
Percentage of those dogs that came with their own Instagram account: at least 50%