Hello again! As the year draws to a close, we'd like to take some time to reflect on the events of the past 12 months, even if each of those months was its own unique raging cyclone full of garbage. But first, we've got some stuff about present and/or future times, so read on!
First on up is our first new beer release of the year, which is coming out Probably Friday and that's Pre-Boil Dave! This lil' ol' beer's been kickin' around in our heads for a good long while, and the short story on the story behind it is that it's a beery tribute to everyone's friend Dave! Dave's the brains (and the brawn and the... everything, really) behind the Black Ale Project (an initiative that partners small breweries with vereran-oriented charities) and Dave has done a whole mess o' collabs all over the dang place and brewers usually think it's a pretty good time to give him all the grunt work (note: it is a good time) but you ain't gotta worry about some sweaty guy hauling grain sacks around, since the boil will kill everything off, so it's fine as long as he's Pre-Boil Dave.
Anyway, in honor of this fine gentleman's service to the local brewing community (not to mention to veterans), we whipped up a smoky black ale using some locally-grown peachwood-smoked malt and also just a whisper of maple syrup and soon you'll get to have some! (Disclaimer: Dave did not sweat into this beer at any point during the brewing process. What he does once he's got his own cans of this beer is his business though).
Anyway, in honor of this fine gentleman's service to the local brewing community (not to mention to veterans), we whipped up a smoky black ale using some locally-grown peachwood-smoked malt and also just a whisper of maple syrup and soon you'll get to have some! (Disclaimer: Dave did not sweat into this beer at any point during the brewing process. What he does once he's got his own cans of this beer is his business though).
And speaking of beer, this Thursday we're doin' another (Virtual) Beers With the Brewers event! Come join us and we'll drink some fancy bottles and ramble about the fancy bottles and/or go on a diatribe about how Belgians name their beers (hint: their system is somewhere between nonsense and chaos) and we probably won't end up talking about shooting people out of cannons but we also can't guarantee that and anyway it'll be fun and you should come hang out!
And! If you're in the mood to hear about some Future Events, next Friday we'll be keepin' that virtual train rollin, only this time we'll be gettin' hoppy! Thassright, we'll be tastin' up some relatively-new-to-us Treasure Hunt alongside classic-to-us Wasted Life and we're bringin' on our first guest star: Liz L'Etoile! Liz is one of the fine folks that runs Four Star Farms (which is where we get most of our hops from) and she's gonna come hang out and talk hops, so you should come hang out too!
And looking even further into the future, it behooves us to mention again that we'll be doin' a whole dang weekend of fun (virtual) events the weekend of January 22nd in honor of our annual made-up holiday Horatio Day! We'll be gettin' some announcements and tickets and all that jazz posted soon, so keep them eyes peeled!
2020: Year in Review
And now, it's time for the extremely long blog post you've all been waiting for: the 2020 Year In Review! We've spent a bit o' time looking back over a year's worth of blog posts, and oh man it's been one hell of a ride. What's normally a fun stroll down Memory Lane was, this year, more like a fresh perspective on watching ourselves slowly unravel over the course of the year.
And on that note, we are gonna try and avoid going on about pandemic this and societal upheaval that (at least to the best of our ability), since this post is really intended to be about navel-gazing, but also there were a few... externalities that set the tone for the year (and, for once, we're not just referring to the building department throwing a fit and threatening to shut us down unless we abide by their vague-yet-apparently-critically-important demands.* There was also some of that, but we'll get to that in due time), so it's bound to come up.
But despite all the weird/terrible things that happened this year, there were also a lot of cool things we managed to accomplish! We started canning (using a mobile canner) and then we pretty quickly graduated to having our own canning line and we vastly expanded our outdoor space and we implemented yet another of Grace's semi-drunken ideas and this time we all got matching-ish tattoos of El Pulpo (the first time we ended up implementing one of her spirited suggestions we ended up starting a kickball league) and we started home delivery and vastly expanded the number of stores that carry our beer (from one to "more than one") and we put out a CD and anyway the point is that quite a bit has happened this year.
And even with all of that, I haven't even gotten to the fact that this year we've made more beer than we ever have in one year and we got to brew a buncha cool collab beers and we vastly expanded our wild beer program and we increased our bottle menu to the point that we currently have more beers available than we ever have at one time (even if you count parties/fests, which essentially means that every day can - and should - be Horatio Day) and I guess our point is that beer might seem like it plays second fiddle a little bit when we're looking back on the year, but I assure you that it always plays first fiddle in our hearts.
But! We're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll get to all that in a bit, but first we gotta look back at this year that started off oh-so-innocently in...
And on that note, we are gonna try and avoid going on about pandemic this and societal upheaval that (at least to the best of our ability), since this post is really intended to be about navel-gazing, but also there were a few... externalities that set the tone for the year (and, for once, we're not just referring to the building department throwing a fit and threatening to shut us down unless we abide by their vague-yet-apparently-critically-important demands.* There was also some of that, but we'll get to that in due time), so it's bound to come up.
But despite all the weird/terrible things that happened this year, there were also a lot of cool things we managed to accomplish! We started canning (using a mobile canner) and then we pretty quickly graduated to having our own canning line and we vastly expanded our outdoor space and we implemented yet another of Grace's semi-drunken ideas and this time we all got matching-ish tattoos of El Pulpo (the first time we ended up implementing one of her spirited suggestions we ended up starting a kickball league) and we started home delivery and vastly expanded the number of stores that carry our beer (from one to "more than one") and we put out a CD and anyway the point is that quite a bit has happened this year.
And even with all of that, I haven't even gotten to the fact that this year we've made more beer than we ever have in one year and we got to brew a buncha cool collab beers and we vastly expanded our wild beer program and we increased our bottle menu to the point that we currently have more beers available than we ever have at one time (even if you count parties/fests, which essentially means that every day can - and should - be Horatio Day) and I guess our point is that beer might seem like it plays second fiddle a little bit when we're looking back on the year, but I assure you that it always plays first fiddle in our hearts.
But! We're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll get to all that in a bit, but first we gotta look back at this year that started off oh-so-innocently in...
* After working with the building department in this city for six years or so, we've deduced that their most strongly-followed policy is that they cannot, under any circumstances, tell us what any of the rules are. If that means they need to suddenly need to pretend we're not in the room just because we had the sheer audacity to ask them a direct question, then so be it.
...January when we kickstarted the year with some good times and some good company on the third-annual Horatio Day!
We had over twenty beers available for y'all to try and there was bacon and donuts and lotsa laughs (and let's not forget the good-natured shouting), and shortly after that we all braved the bellyaches and followed up with the first of several Girl Scout Cookie pairing days and we had HotChix in the house pretty much every other week and there were casks and coloring contests and ice cream and photo exhibits and trivia and cheese and all sorts of good stuff!
Yes indeedy, things were on the up-and-up after a whole year that had been less-than-stellar in a number of ways, and we were ready to take the bear by the horns in 2020 and our optimism remained largely unflagged in...
...February when we started things off with a bang by announcing our first ever can releases: Wellington IPA and Key Lime White!
We were right stoked to call up our friends at State 64 and have them drag in their mobile canning operation and can up a whole mess o' beer - just like a real brewery!
And while we were waitin' for those to come out we started adding to the Critters series, which meant new beers but also it meant building some sweet-ass barrel racks so we'd have a dang place to let these funky beauties do their thang!
Then in the midst of all that, we somehow managed to wrangle a rad-as-hell three-brewery collaboration with Widowmaker and Remnant, wherein we all brewed variants on the same music-inspired beer (namely Tres Brujas) which meant we got to hang out with beer friends while we brewed/drank some tasty beer and, as you might expect, a good time was had by all.
Then we got to cap off the month by bringing back yet another of our famed made-up holidays, this time in the form of Kafka Day, which we celebrated by tapping a bunch of cool barrel-aged beers and hosting a crawfish boil and releasing our first-ever cans and of course we followed all that up with another beer and Girl Scout Cookie pairing and life was good!
Though with that being said, we were certainly hoping we weren't actually seeing the looming cloud on the horizon in...
...March when we hit the ground running with a whole lotta momentum and fun events and a buncha new beers in the production pipeline and also, it turns out, a whole bunch of misplaced optimism. But! We certainly did get while the gettin' was good - there was a sushi class and we got to make another wedding beer and we squeezed in a Pink Boots brewday and we brewed/released a whole bunch of cool collabs and... then the rug got pulled out from under us.
All of us.
All of us.
And like pretty much everyone else at that time, we were scared and confused and we had no real idea what to do because nobody did, and we pretty much spent the second half of the month holding our breath and waiting to see if we'd make it through the month (we did) or if we'd get any kind of clear guidance from a higher authority (still waiting on that one) and they told everyone that the shutdowns would only last for a few weeks but that was pretty clearly bullshit even at the time, even if we did want to believe it, but that brought us to a less-than-optimal start in...
...April when we managed to put some smiles on our faces, even if we did need to use a staple gun to do it.
As we learned to navigate this "new normal" that we kept hearing so much about, we kicked off the month by releasing two collab beers - namely Boneheads (which we brewed with our friends at Heads Up Screenprinting) and Out of Bounds (which we brew for our friends at Thomson Country Club) - with maybe a smidge less fanfare than we had originally planned. So it goes.
But! This was also the month that we started home delivery (which we're still doing!) and we got to dip into the ol' "rainy day stash" to bottle up some goodies that we'd been cellaring (like Skeleton Key, which we're sadly out of; and vintage Pulpo bottles, which will be coming back at some point).
And since we were pining for the simpler times of summers past, we fast-tracked the release of our summer seasonal (which got renamed to Henrietta this year, for legal reasons) and just to hammer that point home a little more we also introduced y'all to a big little fruity DIPA by the name of Pretend It's Summer! And speaking of renaming things, April was also the month that we started calling Extra Naked a Table Beer (instead of "cream ale"), which was actually a pretty big deal for us (we fear change).
And just when we thought things couldn't get any weirder, we started selling/delivering produce boxes! Since everybody was still afraid to go to the grocery store (and/or since stores were only allowing in, like, three people at a time), they proved to be a pretty big hit with everybody except for that one guy that made a whole spreadsheet to prove how he could have saved $0.23 by making three separate trips to other grocery stores. Anyway, it was nice to be able to do something that (hopefully) restored a bit of normalcy to peoples' lives, and we rode that wave as far as we could in...
...May when, for the first time ever, we had all four of our flagship beers available in cans! That might not seem like a huge milestone, since cans were hardly new to us at that point, but it felt like a pretty big step to us and special occasions mean special beers and whoo-ee did we put out a lot of special beers in May!
We bottled Chimera, which was our first-ever full-batch spinoff from the Critters series, and we released Worshipper and we put a whole buncha stuff in cans (including Everything is Peachy, which was the spiritual successor to Pretend It's Summer) and we even co-hosted our first virtual beer dinner (that was focused on Italian food for some reason)...
...and we did the very delicious virtual vertical tasting of El Pulpo variants...
... and we brought on a new member of the brewing team (hi Justin!)...
...and also we made a brewing paddle as a farewell gift for Human Tom, and as if things weren't weird enough already we found some lil' baby skunks living in one of the debris piles that our landscaper neighbors like to leave around and we had to drive them (the skunks, not the landscapers) out to a skunk and porcupine sanctuary which was definitely a first for us.
But that's all well and good, because weird is the name of the game around here and that certainly wasn't gonna change much in...
...June when the State Government announced that they were "probably going to allow outdoor dining at some point" and then got kind of annoyed when people asked follow-up questions. That led to some interesting short-term side-effects for us, most notably in the form of a) people asking us a million follow-up questions in the hopes that we had access to an actual informative news source (we didn't), and 2) a fairly large number of people reading almost all the way through the headline on the news story about reopening and then showing up here to angrily demand that we serve them in a beer garden that did not, if we're to split hairs here, exist yet.
But eventually the rules were revealed and restrictions were lifted and the City of Everett fast-tracked licensing for expanded outdoor seating, and - in what had by then come to be his signature move - the head of the building department threw a tantrum so bad it made the newspaper.
In short, he felt that we (as in, specifically Bone Up) were ineligible to have outdoor seating, largely based on criteria that were provably false (such as the cited lack of drainage in our parking lot), and after he refused to even look at the proposed seating area (so as to confirm or deny his claims, thus contradicting his other statements about how he would "be swinging by on a daily basis" to make sure there were no puddles in our parking lot) he started making a series of increasingly improbable demands, such as insisting that our temporary fence made of pallets be bolted to the pavement, or demanding that the asphalt in our parking lot be clean enough to eat off of at all times.** And after throwing a very public tantrum proved shockingly ineffective, he sent a half dozen inspectors to come over and point around randomly and say "you need to fix that" without elaborating on what the problem was or how to fix it.
** It's worth mentioning that, while we do from time to time exaggerate details for the sake of a good story, this is not one of those times.
** It's worth mentioning that, while we do from time to time exaggerate details for the sake of a good story, this is not one of those times.
But, as is apparently common with inspectors, we never saw any of those people ever again, so we'll never know what their issues were, or if said issues were imaginary. It was a pretty fun time.
Anyway, we finally got the go-ahead on a Tuesday which meant that we had all of two and a half days to build an entire beer garden from scratch (including ordering furniture, which proved difficult since every other brewery and restaurant in the entire state was trying to do exactly the same thing that we were), but somehow we did it!
We turned a pile of pallets and string lights and old labels into a fully-functioning beer garden and we figured out a system for the (many) new rules that we had to implement and we got to deal with a whole bunch of guff from people who were convinced that "contact tracing" was some sort of government surveillance program or something when in fact it consisted entirely of us writing down peoples' names and phone numbers on a piece of paper and then throwing out that paper after a while (maybe they thought The Government didn't know their phone numbers? And that the Deep State was enacting a really convoluted plan to get that critical information and... call them? Unclear).
And around all that exciting chaos, we also managed to release two new Critters beers and another dog beer and a pale ale that challenged the very essence of what can and can't be considered a "picnic" (not to mention yet another fruity DIPA), but that's all to be expected at this point and anyway we also released hella beers in...
...July when we did what we do every July, which was to spend pretty much the entire month planning for our upcoming birthday party. This proved to be a bit of a logistical noodle-scratcher for us, since we weren't (and still aren't) allowed to have people singing or gathering or yelling or standing or having fun and we couldn't have live music (or recorded music, for that matter) and so on.
So in other words, we were tasked (by ourselves) with throwing a party that had most/all of the "party" elements removed and we were maybe a little bit grumpy about it. But! That also meant that we got to start releasing a buncha band beers and some sweet seasonally-appropriate merch and also we put out another Critters beer and another fruity DIPA whose name was a non-subtle nod to the complete unhinged madness that is/was 2020 (it's almost as if we had some kind of... running theme for the year in beer).
And on a "trying to pretend things are normal" kind of note, we did get to say a proper Brewer's Goodbye*** to Human Tom and Grace and we hosted our first in-person event of the summer (another crawfish boil!) and we whipped up a sweet-ass list of beer pairings for all your socially-distanced Fourth of July festivities and all in all it was the closest to sane we'd felt in a while, which was good because we'd need some relative sanity in...
*** We'll leave it up to you to decide what balance of "moderately tearful" and "extremely drunk" goes into such a thing.
*** We'll leave it up to you to decide what balance of "moderately tearful" and "extremely drunk" goes into such a thing.
...August when we kept right on releasin' band beers and cool merch for our upcoming celebrations, thus turning it into one of those sweet-sixteen-esque "birthday month" celebrations only this one was pretty much set to "slow burn" for the month instead of ramping up to a crescendo.
And then once we thought we were really "in the groove" with things runnin' as smoothly as they could, we got some peculiar new regulations issued from The State and long story short we sassed the governor so much that it made the newspaper.
But! That wasn't gonna stop us from having our party at the end of the month and we still put out a sweet-ass mix pack and a friggin CD and our friends at Alex's Ugly Sauce made us a fourth guldang hot sauce and we got all set up to eat a buncha tasty eats and see a buncha friends and... then it got rained out. Of course it did.
But that ol' raincloud had one heck of a silver lining (and no, I'm not talking about how we got to go on our annual pilgrimage to Four Star Farms this year, but that was rad too) - given the low-key nature of this year's party, it was actually pretty easy to reschedule things.
Way back in 2019, our starry-eyed unforeseeably-naïve plans included such extravagances as rental furniture and a dedicated sound person (as opposed to previous years, when we would turn responsibility of soundboards over to "whoever knows the most about plugs") and maybe even a real stage if we were feelin' extra fancy. But none of that was really necessary with our toned-down party plans, so it was a lot more seamless than it could have been.
And anyway since we're field-tested experts in "dealing with chaos" at this point, it's worth mentioning that at some point during the month we also released yet another Critters beer and also another fruity DIPA only this time we pretty much completely gave up on giving it a clever name (or, for that matter, on writing coherent sentences for the text on the side of the can) but that's all fine because life was adequate and we were finally able to "cut loose" a little (very little) bit in...
...September when we got to have our birthday party! And even with all the rules and restrictions and general feeling of despair, we still got to see a ton of friends and release yet another new beer and eat an honestly-kind-of-gross amount of tasty eats and sure, it might not have been the party we wanted to have, but it was the best damn time we could wrangle and we're still glad we got to do it! The chips may have been down, but we get a lotta great people up in here (on both sides of the bar) and that's reason enough to celebrate!
Aaaand then hot on the heels of the good feels from the party we had the distinct displeasure of starting the next week off with pretty much the opposite of a party. Long story short, we got a call from somebody saying that a) they had just received a positive result for a covid test, and 2) they had been in our beer garden the previous day (the day after our birthday party, as it so happens). And we, figuring that people should probably know that sort of information, put up a (somewhat unfortunately-worded) post on social media saying that we'd be closed for the day and we provided all the details we had available to us (which went against the industry norm of saying we were "closed for deep cleaning" with no other explanation) and yada yada yada that made it onto the TV news across the state and we spent the next several weeks correcting people when they would say shit like "I heard all your employees got covid" when in fact none of them did.
But that was honestly just a blip on the ol' radar that didn't stop us from releasing and/or rereleasing a whole ton of beers (which is pretty unusual for us, usually after we release nine beers for the birthday party there's a bit of a lull on new beers) including Joybringer and Wellington and Squash Your Enemies and yet another new funky beer (Kegasus! It's so good!) and somehow the first band beer that we ran out of was Organ Meats (the smoked wheat beer, of all things)!
And, of course, September was also the month when we started to see the Beginning Of The End for Beer Garden Season - the temperature dropped from "hot" to "warm" for a couple days and all of a sudden everybody was all bundled up at the tables and we did buy some heaters before every store in the world ran out (in a very uncharacteristic move, we learned from our debacle with patio umbrellas and planned ahead this time), but it did get the ol' gears turning on what the cold months might possibly look like (and few of the imagined outcomes were particularly rosy).
To be perfectly honest, we were expecting to see another lockdown when the case rates started to substantially rise again (particularly since we were expecting that to more-or-less exactly correlate with people spending more time indoors), but that's still an ongoing saga even now, which means we'll definitely have that on the brain in...
...October when we kicked off the most spooktacular of months by (finally) receiving our very own canning line! We'd been super happy working with State 64 for most of the year, but our schedule was gettin' more than a little mangled tryin' to coördinate with them so we "made the jump" and we got a canning line**** to call our own and we've spent many happy hours cursing at it.
**** I'm actually not sure if we landed on a name to give the canning line, which is weird because we're pretty big fans of giving people names to our equipment. So for the sake of argument, we'll call her Phyllis.
**** I'm actually not sure if we landed on a name to give the canning line, which is weird because we're pretty big fans of giving people names to our equipment. So for the sake of argument, we'll call her Phyllis.
But it turns out that was just the tip o' the ol' spooktacular iceberg, because October turned out to be the month of events! We got the ol' "social calendar" rolling by bringin' in longtime friend-of-the-brewery Pinball Mitch to do what he do best: make spaghetti.
But seriously, he dragged three pinball machines and set 'em up in our doorways so we could have us the best dang "socially distanced" pinball party that we could wrangle (well, it was socially distanced if you didn't notice when Sir-Hugs-A-Lot forgot about our "no hugging" rule that we had to institute because of him specifically)! Then we followed that right up with our first virtual event since... May? Probably?
But seriously, he dragged three pinball machines and set 'em up in our doorways so we could have us the best dang "socially distanced" pinball party that we could wrangle (well, it was socially distanced if you didn't notice when Sir-Hugs-A-Lot forgot about our "no hugging" rule that we had to institute because of him specifically)! Then we followed that right up with our first virtual event since... May? Probably?
And anyway it was the event for Bubs' House (commonly known as the Hartshorne House) and this was the first time that we got to actually see the other speakers and also we made an arguably-historically-inspired beer for it named History Mysteries and it was a lot of fun!
And then pretty much right after that the entire production staff got together and ate a truly disgusting amount of candy (twice) so we'd have a properly spooktacular menu written up for an entire week of beer and candy pairing!
And also we brewed a beer to benefit a dog rescue (specifically Multihead, which used the new-to-us and cool-as-hell hop Multihead, which is a Neomexicanus variety!) and so it was really only logical that we bring back our spooktacular dog costume contest and it was a ton of fun!
And we're damn glad we got to have all those fun times and we took all the momentum we could get to ride that wave into...
...November when the month started with yet another weird rule passed down by The State, this one stating that we needed to close by 9:30 every night. We had been operating for months under the assumption that we couldn't stay open past 10, so this... this didn't really change much. But, it forced our hands a bit to formally make the call that we would not be doing indoor service.
It wasn't an easy call to make, and it certainly made a few people grumpy (though those were almost definitely the same people who couldn't/wouldn't understand why we had to have all those pesky "rules" in the beer garden, and who loved insisting that the statewide "no groups over six" mandate somehow didn't apply to their group of fourteen), and it was/is honestly a pretty scary decision to make. But if you ask us, there's a lot of scarier stuff to be had if we'd chosen differently, so we'll stick to our guns on that one thankyouverymunch.
And since Fate apparently likes to "twist the knife" every now and then, this is also the month that the (ongoing, national) can shortage managed to bite us right in the ol' keister. Long story short, we ran out of cans almost immediately after announcing that we were effectively ending draft service (as in, few people were interested in drinking outside in November, so we stopped prioritizing draft beer in favor of a more portable option) and we got a lot of promises from a few can suppliers (and there were a lot more can suppliers that literally laughed at us) and anyway it was pretty much a monthlong dilly of a pickle of a jam (until our beery neighbors down the street helped us out with a spare pallet - thanks Phil!).
But! It wasn't all sorrows and frowning! We added another brewer to our team (hi Patrick!)...
...and we released Versterven which was the collab beer we made with Lesser Glow (which was originally intended to be brewed to coincide with the release of their latest album, but that happened to coincide with the start of all the covid-related lockdowns so we postponed it a bit)...
...and we put El Pulpo in cans for the first time and we released/rereleased a whole shitload of bottles including yet another dang funky beer and we brought back Pretend It's Summer because the name was seasonally appropriate again (and also because Craig asked us really nicely) and we put out our annual-ish list of Thanksgiving beer pairings (which is, at the very least, a lot of fun to write)...
...and a bunch of us got (somewhat) matching El Pulpo tattoos...
...and we started getting our collective shit together at least a little bit on the whole "retail distribution" and "resuming beer delivery" front (though shipping beer ended up being too expensive to pursue, which was a bummer) and if nothing else that means the ol' bottle fridge is well-stocked for...
...December when we once again got the ol' gears turning to try and dream up fun beer events that don't require you to leave your house. And we started off strong with a virtual beer dinner that combined our fanciest bottles with comfort food from Brato!
We also managed to squeak in a couple more bottle releases (and the can releases haven't stopped since we started 'em, so there's always new stuff on that front)...
...and then Liz and Jared started doing weekly Beer With the Brewers events that definitely didn't have a tendency to derail into Jared making a fool of himself (but on camera this time!) and also we got to work on a project that's very near and dear to everybody who works in production here: floor repair!*****
***** Planned start date of floor repairs: November 2018.
***** Planned start date of floor repairs: November 2018.
So if nothing else, we've got everything spiffed and shined (and, thank god, level) and ready to face the new year!
And looking back at the year as a whole, it's been a year full of makin' square pegs into lemonade and otherwise scrambling wildly to change everything all at once with no notice (in Business Camp they refer to this as "pivoting") only to have to change everything again six weeks later, all while frantically flailing around to try and find somebody, anybody with any concrete answers on what's supposed to be happening only to have that child-turned-grownup moment of realization that nobody knows what's supposed to be going on, least of all the people who are supposed to be in charge.
And sure, we are (for better or for worse) used to seeing/making massive, sweeping changes on a fairly regular basis, and we've resigned ourselves to some measure of existential terror as a fixture of our everyday lives; but this year managed to overlay brand new chaos on top of our existing chaos, without really allaying any of the existing chaos (and, in some cases, magnifying it).
But through it all, we've seen and realized time and again that we are incredibly lucky to have found all the people we've come to know over the years here at Bone Up, both on-staff and on the other side of the bar.
Our front-of-house staff went from standing behind the bar and shootin' the shit with friends and regulars, to dragging trays of plastic cups out to tables that are really not located anywhere near where the beer is poured, and they pulled it off like we'd been planning it that way for years (as opposed to the reality, which was that most of it was made up on the spot).
Our production team went from putting almost 100% of our beer into kegs, to putting almost 100% into cans. And then back to kegs. And then back to cans again.
And hopefully we'll be filling and pouring kegs again sooner rather than later, but the point is that our brewers took a year's worth of scheduling gymnastics and logistical hurdles in-stride as if this nonsense were just a normal day at the office.
And, of course, we're incredibly grateful for everybody who came out to show support or drink in our beer garden or grab beer to go or join us on our virtual events or get delivery or muddle through the weird hoops we had to go through to put on in-person events. Even if you just dropped by with a kind word when the world felt like it was ending, or if you sent us some positive vibes online, we noticed, and it meant the world to us.
We're proud of what we've built here, and we're damn proud of the beers we brew, but y'all are the ones that make this weird little brewery feel like home. We're gonna keep this train rollin' as long as we can, so come on out and grab some beers (or have us bring them to you) and maybe join us online a time or two until you can join us in person and anyway, cheers!
Now let's forget this year ever happened.
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