Hello again! We're back in action and ready to rock with the remainder of our retrospective on the past year, but first things first we gotta get to the here and now, so here's the now!
First on up we've got an important administrative note on our upcoming weekend o' fun, which is to say that all weekend we will be requiring vaccination cards at the door. You can bring a picture, obviously, but the point is that you need to be able to prove your vaccination status if you wanna hang out for Horatio Day (also it means that we'll need to make sure that people only enter/exit through the lobby, which has... proven difficult in the past). Also of note - we *probably* won't be making this a permanent thing (yet) - we're not usually crowded enough that it's warranted, but we figure the extra steps are needed this weekend to keep everybody as safe as we can.
First on up we've got an important administrative note on our upcoming weekend o' fun, which is to say that all weekend we will be requiring vaccination cards at the door. You can bring a picture, obviously, but the point is that you need to be able to prove your vaccination status if you wanna hang out for Horatio Day (also it means that we'll need to make sure that people only enter/exit through the lobby, which has... proven difficult in the past). Also of note - we *probably* won't be making this a permanent thing (yet) - we're not usually crowded enough that it's warranted, but we figure the extra steps are needed this weekend to keep everybody as safe as we can.
And on that note, you should come on out to Horatio Day! We'll be tappin' a bunch of rare and/or barrel-aged beer and we're bustin' out some extra draft lines so we can tap up a whole mess of fancy beer and there's fancy glassware and cake and everything and we're bringin' in some food friends to keep you fed and it's gonna be a great time! We'll have HotChix in the house on Friday and then on Saturday we've got Bonetown bringin' the barbecue and we're finishing off the weekend with Lionheart Confections on Sunday and honestly that makes it a pretty tough decision about which day you should come, which means you should probably just join us for the whole dang weekend!
Come numb your existential pain with us!
And movin' back to a bit before the weekend (sorry, I get excited sometimes), this Thursday we're tappin' a cask! This time around we took one of our favorite beers to cask up (Extra Naked, which is the best beer for cask. Fight me) and tossed in a bunch of subtly fruity tasty-ass Bitter Gold and it's gonna be good as heck and you should come try some!
GIMME
And speaking of Thursday, Thursday is also the day for this month's installment of our music trivia series: Audio Triviality! Matt told us the theme is "aliens, pirates, and ninjas" which should make for an interesting evening but you ain't gotta take our word for it because you should join us!
Oh! And! I got so excited talking about Horatio Day that I forgot to mention we're hosting another sushi class on Sunday!
Oh! And! I got so excited talking about Horatio Day that I forgot to mention we're hosting another sushi class on Sunday!
Sushi Sundays are starting to spoil us.
And before we start finishing up on looking back, it behooves us to point out that next Thursday is Simpsons Trivia night! This time around we'll be focusing on a different season every month and it's all kicking off with Season One! That one's a short season, so it's easy to brush up and also it's chock-full of some hilariously dated pop culture references, so check it out and then come flex your Simpsons knowledge!
2021 Year in Review (Part Two)
And now that we're done with all the upcoming events, it's time to pick up where we left off on our 2021 Year In Review. When we last met we were really rampin' up on the birthday party planning in...
...July when, amidst shouting about our upcoming birthday party, we kept bringing back the last little bits of "normalcy" to our taproom! "It seems like this whole covid situation is starting to get better," we said, like a bunch of big stupid idiots. "Maybe we're finally through the worst of it," we said, pretending like we weren't lying to ourselves.
...July when, amidst shouting about our upcoming birthday party, we kept bringing back the last little bits of "normalcy" to our taproom! "It seems like this whole covid situation is starting to get better," we said, like a bunch of big stupid idiots. "Maybe we're finally through the worst of it," we said, pretending like we weren't lying to ourselves.
Anyway, regardless of whether or not we were right when we said that, we were right when we decided to bring back the coloring contest! It may not seem like a significant detail, but it legitimately brings us joy to see people submitting their coloring entries every month, and it's something we sorely missed when it wasn't around.
We also got new hoodies which might seem like a weird thing to do in July but also we wanted them and they're rad as hell so whatever.
And speaking of sweet merch, July was also the month that we started getting all the sweet merch for our upcoming fifth birthday/anniversary party and also we started brewing/releasing beers for said party but there's a lot more to be said about that in...
...August when we celebrated FIVE YEARS of the taproom being open!
But that was at the end of the month, and the first parts of the month were packed full of beer garden fun times and a dog pool party and we brewed/released so many band beers, on account of how we were going as all-out as possible with the live music celebrations this year!
On a less exciting (but still pertinent) note, a bit of a shadow was cast across our future plans, as we kept hearing more and more about this "delta variant" that was making the rounds. And haha oh man remember when Delta was the Big Scary Thing and we expected that there might be more restrictions or at least we'd need to require vaccine passports and then... nobody did anything? Good times and thank Hops there were no adverse consequences to continuing on the "let's pretend covid is over" track. Anyway the important thing is that we didn't let that rain on our parade too much because we got to celebrate our birthday at the end of the month!
And since this was a big occasion (five years! Somehow!) and since we hadn't gotten to do anything fun the year before, we went as big as we could feasibly go! In 2019 we had seven bands in one day, which was rad but also a logistical nightmare, so this year we had NINE bands over the course of THREE DAYS (totalling eleven sets if you count the bands that played twice) and we had tasty food all weekend and brought in a buncha rad vendors and people were having so much fun that they didn't seem to notice that it was raining for several hours on Saturday and we had our first-ever mosh pit and some dude lost his shoe in a puddle in said mosh pit and an ice cream showed up unannounced at the end of the night one night and for reasons I'm still not completely clear on we now own a cloak covered in weird runes (we definitely did not have it before the party, and now we can't get rid of it) and we got to hang out with a bunch of old friends and make some new friends and drink a whole mess of tasty beer and we can't wait to do it again! And lucky for us, we were able to keep that Good Vibes train rollin' in...
...September when we brought back even more things from the Before Times! Yes indeedy, cask was back (again) and we had the first in-person trivia night in eighteen months or so (specifically Audio Triviality, hosted by our very own Bananamasher)!
And since September is the month when we start to shift from "beer garden fun times" to "let's hunker down where it's warm," (though we certainly didn't stop outdoor events yet) we started bringing back food popups (including some taproom favorites like Matilda's and Mr. Tamole) and cooking classes became a regular feature on the ol' event calendar!
And in beer news, we had the honor of getting to brew a wedding beer for two longtime Friends Of The Taproom - Brian and Amy - and since Brian apparently goes by "Kaboobi" the beer was called Kaboobi's Top Score!
And in less-exciting beer news, September was the month that we announced that two of our year-round beers - namely Key Lime and Wasted Life - would be relegated to Seasonal status. It was a decision we'd been pondering on for months and years, and passing the Five Year Mark seemed like the appropriate time to reëvaluate and move on into the future instead of shackling ourselves to the past or whatever (and also Wasted Life had a frustrating tendency to rely on hops that ended up becoming impossible to get, but that's really only part of it). And speaking of looking toward the future, there's plenty more of that in...
...October when we decided that we should continue bringing back all the stuff we used to love doing in the taproom!
That meant we brought back Simpsons Trivia for the first time in pretty much forever and we re-brewed Green Smoothie for the first time in even longer than that and there was another dog costume contest!
Our beloved beer and candy pairing got turned into an Everett Bar Crawl kind of situation (which, against our own wishes, was named "trick or treating adult style" or something like that) only this time we (and once again "we" refers to several businesses working in tandem, as opposed to just us at Bone Up) tried to learn from our previous mistakes vis-a-vis underordering swag for the passport completion, and instead decided that the reward for completing the bar crawl passport would be the friendships you made along the way.
Also in terms of actual new stuff and not just bringing back old favorites, we got to have a release party for The Sachem's Ale! We brewed this beer for the band Dzö-nga and they came and hung out and drank beer and played music and we had a buncha fun!
And while we're on about fun times, there's plenty more of those in...
...November when we tried to shake off the "cold weather blahs" with one of our favorite pastimes: celebrating made-up holidays! We started off mid-month with a weekend-long event to celebrate the rerelease of our beloved wintertime chocolate orange stout: El Pulpo!
That also coincided with the release of our vaguely-holiday-themed mix pack. We didn't have a holiday for that, because it was meant to accompany the name brand holidays that you already know about, but I still think it was rad, so there you go.
Anyway, while Pulpo Day featured a bunch of vintage beer and some barrel-aged releases, we also had a big ol' release day full of new (and/or returning) barrel-aged beers and that's Shitty Wednesday! This sort-of-made-up holiday is meant to help ease the pain of driving and/or existing on the day before Thanksgiving (as opposed to our traditional Thanksgiving beer pairings, which will help you get through Turkey Day and/or get you arrested if you actually try them) and we feel like the best thing to dull that particular pain is barrel-aged beer!
We also did another Hartshorne event and we released new flannels and ugly-sweater-style Krampus shirts and anyway there's a lot more swag to be had in...
...December when, all things considered, it was kind of a slow month, but also that's what December is for. Anyway we thought it would help with the December Doldrums if we gave you an excuse to come out to the bar for several hours under the guise of "holiday shopping," all while supporting local businesses and artists, so we launched our Holiday Market series!
Every weekend we brought in a couple local vendors and had them set up shop in the taproom and at the very least we acquired an unreasonable amount of art because of that and anyway it was a good time! And on the beer front, we made the extremely-business-savvy decision to release two more dark beers in cans!
The first was a vanilla cinnamon imperial stout named Dark Humor, which was brewed for the band SkyTigers, who was a last-minute addition to our birthday party music roster (and it maybe took us a little while to fit that beer into our production schedule, but we brew a beer for every band at our party god dammit) and the second was a caramel porter brewed for a cute lil' pup named Ozzy and honestly we find cute dogs to be very persuasive and sometimes that's all it takes to get us to brew beers for/about them.
But that's certainly not the end of dog beers around here, as there's plenty more to be had in...
...the future. But we'll get to that when we get to it.
...the future. But we'll get to that when we get to it.
Right now is usually the time when we look back fondly on the year that's passed and we talk about how lucky we are and all that but this year kind of sucked, huh? Before we took the time to read* through a year's worth of blog posts we pretty much remembered the year as being kind of a slog, but it turns out that the uncertainty and stress of the first half of the year had already started to fade from our memories and the part of the year that was a slog was the *good* part.
But even when things were at their most dismal we were able to find some bright spots and being able to share that with y'all was a big part of what kept us going. It's pretty unlikely that anybody was anxiously awaiting their chance to watch Jared semi-drunkenly ramble about the history of mild ale on a Zoom call, but we had a few people join us every week during the Dark Times and honestly that was really all we could hope for.
And I guess the point here is that we are lucky - we get to spend our time doing something we care about, and it just so happens to be something that resonates with people. Over the years we've gotten to meet/know a whole bunch of wonderful people - staff and regulars and people who we see every now and then and people who are passing through that we get to hang out with for just one night and we've gotten to make a bunch of weird beer and host some ridiculous events and travel to exotic places like Pittsburgh and work with people we never thought we'd cross paths with and I guess my point is that we've gotten to do a lot of extremely cool shit and we couldn't have done it without you.
We just want to brew some tasty beer and show you a good time, and we're glad you're enjoying it! We're looking forward to keep this weird little train rolling for as long as the wheels stay on, and we're stoked that you're along for the ride!
* I would say "reread," but that implies that we read them the first time.
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