Howdy friends! What with this bein' the end of the year and all, we figured we'd spend a while lookin' back on the past year or so and... woof. It turns out that we didn't particularly need or want to travel down this particular memory lane, but we did and now you have to suffer with us! Although, since this year has been so... interesting, we figured we'd split up our year-end lookback into two blog posts instead of one, and that's definitely not because Jared has a tendency to forget what day it is.* But! Before we get to retrospectin', we gotta get hip with the haps in the upcoming week and (slightly) beyond, so check it!
This could be your view at our brunch on Saturday. Just saying
First on up is the sort-of return of a beloved beer: Honey 'n Hops! We may have "mixed things up" with a couple (most) of the ingredients, but the guiding principle remains the same: we take a big ol' IPA made with local grains and local hops and "goose it up" with a whole bunch of a cool varietal honey (orange blossom, in this case) and voilà! Tasty times! Anyway this tasty tipple will be available in cans and probably on draft this Friday!
If you want to hear an hour long lecture on varietal honey, find Liz and feed her a Honey 'n Hops
And speaking of beers available in cans on Friday, we're releasing our latest band collab in cans this Friday! We met up with new-to-the-scene Attest and brewed up a light 'n lightly dry-hopped tasty ol' beer that we're callin' Unchained and it'll be in cans right soon!
"Brewing"
And moving on to slightly more bummerish beer news, on account of all the Holiday Schedule Disruptions,** we're holdin' off on having a cask this week as well. I know, we're none to jazzed either, but we gotta make sure our casks get the love and attention they deserve, and this is the best way we can do that. But! The beer engine will be up and running next week for suresies!
And speaking of holiday hours, here's your reminder that we are closing early on New Year's Eve on account of our strong belief that New Year's Eve sucks.
But! We ain't got no beef with New Year's Day and we certainly ain't got no beef with bringing in a whole bunch of tasty brunch foods to help you get through your NYE hangover, so we're bringin' in our new friends from Biscuitdrop on Saturday from 12-3 and they've got a delicious brunch spread available and you should come havre some!
And moving on a bit further into the weekend, we've got our first sushi class of the year on Sunday and we suggest you come check it out!
But! We ain't got no beef with New Year's Day and we certainly ain't got no beef with bringing in a whole bunch of tasty brunch foods to help you get through your NYE hangover, so we're bringin' in our new friends from Biscuitdrop on Saturday from 12-3 and they've got a delicious brunch spread available and you should come havre some!
And moving on a bit further into the weekend, we've got our first sushi class of the year on Sunday and we suggest you come check it out!
All right 2022, let's see what fresh hell you are capable of bringing. Fucking fight me
And moving a little farther into next week, it behooves us to give a shout out to Audio Triviality next Thursday! The theme is apparently ninjas and pirates and aliens, which definitely makes sense in the context of heavy metal and/or punk so there's really no need to explore that idea any further and anyway you should come hang out!
I'm going to go ahead and bet this playlist is gonna be SO MUCH power metal LFG
And, lastly, before we get started looking back, is our second-to-last reminder for Horatio Day! The weekend of January 7th-9th we'll be tappin' up a whole mess of fancy pants beer (though no actual Fancy Pants this time) and there will be cool flights and snacks and merriment and we think you'll like it so come on out and join us for some good times!
I'm getting tipsy just looking at this draft list
Alrightyroo! It's once again time to don our best navel-gazing glasses and look backwards on the past year in a tradition that we're really starting to regret starting: The Year In Review!
* For the first time in the history of this blog, this is actually true.
** And/or all the new covid-related hullabaloo. If only somebody could have warned us that this sort of thing could happen. Say, maybe, every medical expert in the entire goddamned world? Nah, that seems a little farfetched.
** And/or all the new covid-related hullabaloo. If only somebody could have warned us that this sort of thing could happen. Say, maybe, every medical expert in the entire goddamned world? Nah, that seems a little farfetched.
2021 Year in Review (Part One)
Truth be told, we managed to block most of the early parts of the year from our memory (and by "early parts" we mean "the entire first half of the year and then some"). But thankfully, we've got our trusty blog archives to refer back to and now we've got a (mostly) fresh perspective on that time period as we watch ourselves try to be All Smiles through an honestly very difficult time (though if you're feeling charitable, you could say that we were doing whatever we could to brighten up peoples' days a bit during said difficult times).
As many of you know, we're no strangers to existential crises around here - hell, we created a holiday whose theme was effectively "let's celebrate our survival through another surreal nightmare" and we've had legitimate reason to celebrate every year for at least three years (soon to be four!).
But with that in mind, pretty much every year so far has also had some sort of big milestone/accomplishment, or at least something that's a big deal to us. Crowlers, expansions, our wild beer program, canning, and so on and so on. But this year our main accomplishment was existing, which is probably a metaphor for the pervasiveness of the human spirit or, like, birds.
But with that in mind, pretty much every year so far has also had some sort of big milestone/accomplishment, or at least something that's a big deal to us. Crowlers, expansions, our wild beer program, canning, and so on and so on. But this year our main accomplishment was existing, which is probably a metaphor for the pervasiveness of the human spirit or, like, birds.
Looking back on the year as a whole is honestly a bit of a trip - watching ourselves slowly, tentatively, add back parts of the business that we'd had to shut down, all while completely uncertain of whether or not we should and whether we'd be able/allowed to keep doing these things. You know how it all ends (and it's arguably a happy-ish ending), but it's still an interesting experience to relive. But you ain't gotta take my word for it: let's dive right in, starting in...
...January when things were honestly still pretty bleak out in The World so we mostly held a series of low-key virtual events in order to try and give people something fun to do and/or stave off madness. These were honestly pretty fun for us, even though most of them heavily featured things like "Jared stammering at the camera because he's laughably bad at public speaking" and "group discussions derailing in very weird ways because we weren't expecting to have to moderate people" and "realizing, repeatedly, that there's a lot of dead air if we're trying to host a virtual event and eat (and/or cook) at the same time." But! It was, as they say, a momentary diversion on the road to the grave, and that's really the most we could hope for. Plus we got to hang out with a bunch of people we wouldn't have gotten to see otherwise, so we'll call it a win.
And aside from the recurring, largely low-key virtual events, we also celebrated Horatio Day! Sure that was also a series of virtual events, only these virtual events had fancy food pairings and fancy beer and rad glassware and there was a Secret Session that largely involved one of our brewers shotgunning an entire four-pack of El Pulpo on camera and we released the ugly-but-delicious Critters XI (there were some... massive clarity issues due to the fruit puree we used in one component of that blend) and there was a surprising amount of discussion about clown weddings and also Horatio Day was held three weeks late because we kind of forgot how the linear passage of time works (and these things take time to plan, so we couldn't just pull something out of our collective asses at the last minute), but it still ended up being a good time!
We had our concerns that it might be a bit bittersweet to try and host it online, but it turns out that the sentimental and introspective parts of our brains are easily thwarted by Quadless Leg Monster (and thwart we did!). And that's certainly not the last time those parts of our brains needed to be thwarted, as things looked pretty much the same in...
...February when we... held... a series... of low-key virtual events. In order to try and give people something fun to do. And then we ended the month by (virtually) celebrating one of our made-up holidays.
But in the middle of the month we did do something cool that was (sort of) new to us - we released (in cans) a pair of beers that were made to be blended into a beertail (or drunk on their own, whatevs): It's Like We Finish Each Others... ...Sandwiches! (which was meant to be a pop culture reference, but not for the thing that most people think of. Turns out that joke has been used a few times over the years). We'd done paired beers like this on draft before, usually for weddings, but weddings weren't exactly happening during the first year that we were canning so this was a first!
We released it for Valentine's Day (when we held a Galentine's Trivia night with Boston GLOW) and we made mix packs of the beers-for-beertails and a good time was had by some! And then we ended the month with our unfortunately-annual existential-terror-themed holiday: Kafka Day!
Only for this holiday we applied some lessons we'd learned from our previous virtual holiday and decided not to host four consecutive events centered around high-ABV beer (truth be told we were probably still hungover from Horatio Day when we held Kafka Day) and anyway this "holiday" ended up spanning two weeks instead of three days (and it involved Girl Scout Cookie pairings) and the second weekend just so happened to fall in...
...March when things were finally? kind of? starting to sometimes look a little more like life as we knew it.
And by that I mean it was sometimes above forty degrees outside which meant our beer garden was somehow (sometimes) in full swing again!
Or at least it was until we shut it down for the latter half of the month in order to do repairs and renovations and definitely not because the city pointed out that our seasonal beer garden permit was only valid through October 2020.
But! Before that happened we took advantage of the (relatively) nice weather and teamed up with all the other Everett breweries for a Mass Beer Week bar crawl! It was one of those "visit all the stops and get a prize" kind of deals, but since nobody really had any idea if anyone was gonna come out for our bar crawl in March and also there were still hella social distancing/capacity restrictions in place, the organizers* decided to play it cautious on the amount of passports/prizes ordered (so that nobody would be left with, like, ten cases of unusable glassware) and in retrospect that ended up being maybe not the best call because every brewery involved ran out of passports/prizes on, like, the first day of a weeklong event (which drew a bit of a ...spirited reaction from an industry-adjacent acquaintance of ours).
And anyway amidst all the renovations and rebuilding the beer garden and kinda-sorta doing some in-person service (mostly on our three-table patio), we still kept that ol' Virtual Event train rollin'!
In addition to our weekly beer tastings, we did another event for the Hartshorne House and we did a beer release event with Glacier!
Glacier, if you'll recall, was associated with the big ol' imperial stout No Light Ever and in honor of that beer's release, we got on the ol' Virtual Chat with the band and hung out with a buncha cool people and Matt did some good old-fashioned trivia times and we raised some money for NIVA/Save Our Stages and a good time was had by all (particularly those of us who forgot that we were drinking a 9% beer and absentmindedly drank a whole four pack without getting up)! But as much as we legitimately enjoyed doing virtual events, that was all gonna fall by the wayside as everything got turned upside down (again) in...
* We were consulted during the planning stages, but we weren't In Charge
* We were consulted during the planning stages, but we weren't In Charge
And haha oh man remember when there were a jillion rules about how people were and weren't allowed to go out in public and they were never fully communicated to anyone and they kept changing all the time and for some reason it was up to businesses (in this case, us) to enforce this weird/insane/vague bullshit at the risk of losing our license if we didn't?
Well we were still in the middle of all that nonsense for the entire month of April and, in a throwback to the glory days of 2020, we got a bunch of rule changes from the state every couple weeks wherein they'd hand down a bunch of very specific regulations about whether or not dance floors could reopen (they could not), coupled with one difficult-to-interpret statement meant to encompass everything that pertained to us specifically.
Anyway, we did our best to keep people happy while still maintaining the rules and it went about as smoothly as we could have hoped, though we really hope that the government doesn't ever force us to pick fights with dumb people again.
But! In amongst all the confusion, we were still able to maintain focus on the one thing that's really important: beer!
We released Passion (Fruit) Project, which would set the template for a lot of our later fruit beers, and in honor of the fifth anniversary of our first brewday (which is actually in late May, but whatevs) we brewed an updated version of our first-ever beer release (namely Honey 'n Hops)!
We also re-brewed Tres Brujas and since that beer happens to be delightful on cask we also brought back cask! And it turns out that cask was just the start of us bringing back the things we loved most about the taproom, because there's a lot more of that in...
..May when we brought back indoor seating! Kind of! Long story short, we got tired of our beer garden getting rained out so we put a couple tables back in our taproom for rainy days and/or for people who like sitting indoors. We kept the tables hella far apart and we kept the bay door open and the fans on and we didn't bring back barstools and so on and so forth but it still felt like real progress!
We were finally taking (admittedly small) steps toward restoring the taproom to its former glory after fourteen of the longest months we'd ever lived through! Aaaand then the next dang week the government announced - with about a week's worth of notice - that their Official Policy had changed to something along the lines of "let's pretend covid never happened!" Or, rather, the governor announced that all covid restrictions would be lifted at the end of the month, but then (in the same statement) clarified that by saying that some of the restrictions would be loosened, and the only further elaboration after that was to say that dance floors were not permitted to reopen, but ball pits were.
So it was really the sort of clarity and exactitude that we were used to at that point, and it was almost reassuring that they'd take the time to make sure things were as uncertain as possible, even with the last of the major rule changes. But! Aside from all that nonsense, May also marked the first of our big milestones for the year (which I already kinda mentioned) and that's the five-year anniversary of our first brewday!
The anniversary of the brewday isn't really a day we throw a big kerfuffle about, but it marks a pretty important occasion for us so at the very least we had to get a little misty-eyed about it before going about our day. And that's certainly not the last time we got all sentimental this year, but before we could do that we had to look forward, which is pretty much all we did in...
...June when we got to be Ahead Of Our Time by having a bunch of supply-chain issues before it was cool. We had more than a couple beers get delayed because - all of a sudden - the lead time on our labels doubled, freight shipping times quadrupled, lead times on merch (especially glassware but also apparel) increased exponentially, and the can shortage that was Big News a year ago wasn't over (it still isn't, if you're wondering).
But! This was also the first month out of the year that things even kinda-sorta started to feel even a little bit close to "normal," and that was due in no small part to the return of bar seating! And while I don't usually like to quote blog posts in the year-end wrap-up, there is a bit that pretty much perfectly sums up the way we felt about this: "...and now the real noodle-scratcher is: did we feel like things Out In The World are actually getting better/safer, or did we just get tired of turning away grumpy boomers who are stubbornly hellbent on sitting at the bar (and only at the bar)? We'll let you draw your own conclusions on that one." Ha! Good times, indeed.
And! We also managed another banner month full of beery highlights: this month brought us The Great Equalizer, our contribution to the Vox & Hops Brewtal North America collab where we got paired with new-to-us band Fuming Mouth and brewed a smoked brown ale (which was, astoundingly, their idea and not ours).
We also brewed Into the Unknown, the beer that set the template for many of our current IPAs, and in order to celebrate our 500th batch we doubled the ingredients in Extra Naked and made Birthday Suit!
And also we started shouting about our upcoming birthday party, but we can hold off on that for a second because that's pretty much all we did in...
...to be continued next week
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