2023 Year in Review (Part One)

Howdy friends! Before we get gettin' into the Year In Review that we promised you last week, we should probably let you know that there's some hangs on the horizon! More to the point, our pals at Remnant wanted to do a tap takeover with us so they bought a buncha kegs and they're gettin' tapped at the Bow Market location next Saturday (the 27th) and we (Liz and Jared) will be swingin' by to hang out for the evening, so you should come hang out with us!

For those of you wondering about the mentioned-but-never-realized estate sale that we've talked about a bit, we're still in a "holding pattern" while we "deal with nonsense" so it's gonna "be kind of a while" before we "have any real news" on that front, so sit tight - we'll let you know as soon as we know!

Anyway, movin' right along to navel gazing about 2023! While we know that 2023 was A Time for all of us, we like to use the Year In Review to look back on all the cool shit we got to do, and we got to do a ton of cool shit in 2023 - we pretty seriously stepped up our game on band collabs, we started hosting comedy shows, we hosted the Air Guitar regionals again (and it made the Boston Globe!), plus we made a whole shitload of cool beers and had a lot of good times!

​More to the point, we'll be mostly ignoring the Elephant In The Room in favor of focusing on all the Good Stuff that happened. It might feel a little... revisionist, but we've spent enough time griping about the stupid bullshit we've had to deal with, plus it's kind of our whole thing to find a way to party even when the shit gets too real, so that's what we're gonna do.

2023: The Year That Was (But Only the Good Parts)

Like most of the more famous years, 2023 starts in ...

...January when we almost definitely approached the world with a renewed spring in our step or whatever, saying "2023 will be our year!" And sure, we can scoff at the naïveté of our past selves as though we're not saying something similar about 2024 (or, more likely, consciously avoiding saying something similar because we've made that mistake before) but we hit the dang ol' ground running in 2023 - Rumble Royale and 600 made their draft debut at Horatio Day (and that was also the same weekend we hosted our first-ever Mug Club Social) and this was the month that Fiddle Times started becoming a more regular thing. ​

Plus we started hosting monthly comedy nights and the power definitely didn't go out during that first one, forcing people to tell jokes while lit only by the emergency lights (seriously though, it was kind of incredible how everyone just... rolled with it. A comedy miracle! Or something), and we hosted The Office trivia, also we made a beer for a book which is something we've never done before (or since, actually), and - for those of you looking for some real excitement - we finally got to recoat the brewery floors! Oh, and also we made a point of doing (at least) one band collab beer per month and in January it was Girih which ruled because that beer (The Hourglass) was super tasty and also the guys from Girih are super nice and we really dig their band (I would say that's the most important part, but they're all the most important part).

Anyway, things were off with a bang, a bang which continued in...

...February when our damn sign blew off the building (we found it several weeks later, looking more than a little worse off for all its travels). OK fine maybe that wasn't exactly "big news" or "a good thing" and also February was the month we got a rather... terse* cease and desist from a certain young womens' leadership program who apparently took umbrage with a beer and cookie pairing event that we do every year (an event which, we might add, had been explicitly approved by them in the past). ​

Anyway aside from that stupid crap, February was great! We started stocking the Big Mac empanadas and we hosted MCU trivia and we hosted a coffee marketplace and we collabed with Actor Observer to make Fool's Gold (and in addition to being rad dudes, some of them made it out for brewday and canning day, which isn't something everyone is able to do but we're stoked when it happens)!

Also! We (Liz and Jared) got to travel out to Amish country to do a collab brewday with Succession Fermentory (They're on a farm! They have a coolship! There were bees everywhere! These are all good things!) and that beer is a funky beer so it's yet to be released so if all goes well, you'll have a lil' Bone Up from beyond the grave down in PA at some point this year!

​Overall we had a swell time in February despite it being the objectively-worst month of the year and those swell times kept swelling in...

...March when we really "brought the goods" for Kafka Day in the sense of releasing six friggin' beers which is not something we normally do on one day! A couple of those beers (Horatio's Reserve, Fisticuffs) leaned pretty heavily on the 600 that we'd been aging in barrels (we also rereleased 600, but we're still counting that as a release to "beef up" our numbers) and we apparently had our silly pants on because we also decided to release three dang ol' wild beers (including High Voltage, which I could have sworn we released like three years ago, but here we are) and anyway that's just the start of things! ​

We also brewed our annual Pink Boots beer and this year's release (Shade Queen, btw) was a collab with Distraction Brewing down in Roslindale where both breweries brewed their own take on the same beer and also we brewed two band collab beers this month (Master of Extremity and Caustic Abomination, collabs with Fuming Mouth and All Out War respectively) because the fine folks at Decibel Fest saw fit to pair us with two bands for that fest (the fest was in April, but we tend to get excited about new beers so we released them a lil' early) and we apparently felt like we hadn't brewed enough collabs this month because we also brewed another collab with Vox & Hops - this time part of a "worldwide collaboration effort" or something where a bunch of breweries worldwide brewed "mosh-pit-themed" beers and anyway the beer (Collateral Moshing) was awesome and also Vox & Hops is great to work with so it's rad we got to do another collab with them! ​

And on top of all those rad beers, we also had another Hot Sauce Fest and hosted our first-ever Rock Band Night which was accidentally right before one of the biggest video game conferences in the country and our much-requested (by us) Iron Maiden pinball machine took up residence in the taproom and dang but that's a lot of stuff for one month, but we sure as shit didn't slow down a bit in...

...April when we kicked off the month by releasing a beer to celebrate Heads Up Screenprinting's fourth anniversary (it was our third collab with them so we called it Cerberus and Heads Up made some extremely rad shirts for the beer)!

We got to go to the aforementioned Decibel Fest and we (specifically Jared) got way too into the Squid Facts hotline that's heavily advertised down there (you text them and they send you squid facts! And when they run out of squid facts they send you bug facts! It's awesome!) ​

And while we're talkin' about fests and/or celebrating we also got to be a part of the joyous reëmergence of NERAX! NERAX is pretty much the best beer festival because instead of standing around in a parking lot and drinking 2oz samples of crappy adjunct stouts, you get to stand around in a VFW (or similar) and drink imperial pints of incredible cask beers with a bunch of old people! (OK fine, not everybody is old, but the crowd definitely doesn't skew young).

And even further on the fun times train, we hosted bong painting and an orchestra (not on the same night, though that would have been rad) and then we closed out the month with what is probably one of the most chaotic events we'd ever hosted. See, The Red Chord (or, more accurately, their vocalist) thought it would be rad if we re-brewed Fixation On Red Ale, so we agreed on the condition that they'd come and attend one of our Band Hangouts events, and then they (or rather their guitarist and bassist) "upped the ante" by deciding to host a trivia night at Bone Up, despite - by their own admission - not having any idea how trivia works. Anyway we invited some other rad local metal bands (namely Brain Famine and Blood Tithe and also we invited that one poop-joke-themed death metal band but they ended up cancelling, which was for the best) and we got to spend the evening competing in "Obnoxious Trivia" (which was obviously entirely composed trivia questions about a parallel universe to ours, unbeknownst to all who were competing) and at one point it resulted in what we can only call "death metal freestyling" and I forgot to mention earlier but there was also Fixation On Red Ale merch (designed, I think, by IndieMerch)!

Anyway I've prattled on enough about that, which means we need to prattle our way on to...

...May when we kicked off Beer Garden Season with a little live music (DnA's Evolution, Thrust Club, and Radio Compass) and a lot of brightly-colored beer (Henrietta) and then we realized that "hey, it's fun to have live music outdoors" so we had some more live music outdoors (this time featuring Ravage and Officer X)!

Also on the "kinda sorta music-related" train we (somehow) started releasing beers for the Anniversary party (which, if you have forgotten, is not until late August) - starting with Ales of Demonic Possession (brewed for Clouds Taste Satanic) and also our "true" band collab for the month was with Widower (the beer was Synthetic Dreams**) and also we released We're All Doomed! This one was our 666th batch and, defying the convention that we set for ourselves, we decided to make a weird session beer instead of some big ol' barrel-aged (or destined-to-be-barrel-aged) monstrosity and so we made a golden mild and holy hell was it tasty! ​

And speaking of releasing weird and/or obscure styles (or at least what passes for obscure these days) we also released an ESB named Tom's Fault in honor of the many, many things that are/were Tom's Fault (and also because Tom had some sort of Major Life Event but I didn't read his email all the way through) and anyway I daresay that's a damn good start to Beer Garden Season, so let's hope it doesn't rain every goddamn weekend for the rest of the summer, much like it started to do in...

...June (or should I say Djune, since this is the month we released Django. 

No, I should not say Djune, I should in fact never say that again) when we hit the ground running with back-to-back weekends fulla friendship and music and fun times, starting with a show/marketplace/Pride beer release known as GARF (for which John printed up some sweet custom tank tops)!

The week after, we hosted Boston Is Doomed where we had a buncha cool-ass doom/stoner/sludge bands perform and also a band came all the way out from friggin' OHIO just to play at our brewery (Buffalo Ryders, who were just completely so much fun to see live)! ​

And around all the tunes and fun times we also brought back Key Lime and we brewed a collab beer with our friends from Lobzter King (named Bone King, natch) and we did a beer and cheese pairing with Formaggio!

We ended the month by once again hosting the Air Guitar regional championships and if you've never been to an air guitar competition you really need to go. It sounds silly, because it is, but there's really no way to describe the total pandemonium that results from one of these competitions, nor can you really imagine the sheer joy radiating from the stage (and audience, honestly) as people put everything they've got into pretending to play guitar. ​

Anyway that's most of the highlights for June and in the interest of not writing an entire novel on the blog (at least not all at once), we'll pick this up... next week.

* I feel like it's probably poor form to call it "pissy" but you get the gist
** When one of the band members saw that it was 6.9% ABV he started laughing and said "that's the weed number" which I have not stopped thinking about since