2023 Year in Review (Part Two)

Howdy kids! We're taking a break from our regularly-scheduled "not having any events to tell you about" to tell you that we have an event to tell you about! More to the point, our pals over at Remnant bought some beer from us back when we could still sell beer and they'll be tapping it at their Bow Market location this Saturday! We (Liz and Jared) will be there for The Tappening at six and we'll be hangin' out until the (Bone Up) beer runs dry! They didn't buy a mega massive amount (a log of Civil Disobedience, a log of barreled El Pulpo, and a case of Critters XX, I believe) so if we really put our minds/mouths to the task we can totally kick all them kegs/cases so come on out and hang out!

Aaaaand back to our regularly scheduled programming, we're back with the Year In Review (But Only the Good Parts) and when we last left off we were about to get into...

...July when the Anniversary preparations really reached their apex (we have learned, through extensive bitter experience, to plan way farther ahead than we think we'll need to) - beers were being released left and/or right, the merch started showing up (including - finally! - the sweet dimple mugs that we've been trying to get for the anniversary since pretty much the first one) which means that in a weird way this was the first month of the year "without" a band collab since most of the beers we brewed were for the anniversary. We still had our monthly band hangouts, and it was pretty much rad as hell because it was all bands that were scheduled to play at the anniversary and the "beer release" for the night was Blood Lightning, which we brewed for Blood Lightning, but I think we'd already brewed the beers for several of the other bands that were in attendance. Anyway we had a bunch of other cool shit planned for July but this was the month when it started raining every weekend (and, somehow, exclusively on weekends which was a real "insult to injury" kind of thing) so we had to cancel a bunch of stuff, including the RPM Fest preparty that we were super stoked to be hosting (in fact, one of the few non-anniversary beers that we released in July was for that show). ​

But anyway, July wasn't all rain and gloominess - that was also the month that we got to go out to CBC to brew Dada Processing which was a pretty huge deal for us personally since their brewmaster is somebody that's Kind Of A Big Deal as far as professional brewers go! ​

Anyway, we also got to host our Musician's Marketplace in addition to our usual slate of rad events but really the whole summer was just leading up to The Big Day (and mildly panicking about whether or not there would be rain on The Big Day) in...


...August when we kicked off the month by hosting part of Somergloom (and, of course, releasing a beer by the same name to pair with the show)!

After that, we kinda "laid low" on the live music front up until the end of the month (partly because we got tired of cancelling shows due to rain, and partly because some of the bands we'd booked said they couldn't guarantee that they'd keep the noise level within the legally-acceptable limit). Anyway this was also the month that all of the regular Simpsons Trivia teams came to regret their own decision making (they had voted to make August's theme Season Thirteen and whoa man was that not a good call) and anyway pretty much all of our thoughts/attentions were focused on The Anniversary so let's just talk about that! In addition to the fact that we had kickass music all weekend long (and we brewed/blended nineteen friggin' beers to go with that music)!

We also had a whole buncha food friends come by and bring tasty eats and Heads Up did live screenprinting and also there were custom tie-dyed versions of the regular anniversary shirts and also a lot more tighty-whities getting shot out of a cannon than you tend to see at most shows (and the fact that our reaction to this was "yeah that's pretty much what we expected them to do" shows that we've made some excellent decisions about who we choose to spend our time with) oh and also we released an additional non-band beer on the anniversary weekend just for funsies and that's the beer that was collaboratively named by our mug club (who are great at coming up with large volumes of extremely terrible beer names, it turns out) which was known as Joining The War On The Side Of The Whales (or JtWotSotW if you want an acronym that takes longer to say than the full name) and anyway there's a reason The Anniversary is our favorite weekend of the year and the reason is that it's full of good times and friendship and a surprising amount of barrel-aged beer especially given how hot it is outside and it's a straight-up delight to get to hang out with y'all for an entire weekend!

Anyway, that's enough about the anniversary which means it's time to move on to...

...September when we started the month by sponsoring RPM Fest (which, if you've never been, is a pretty incredible metal fest out in central Mass) and then the week after that Adapter Adapter, Coma Hole, Eight Foot Manchild, and Trub all played a show for Jared's birthday (kidding, of course. It did happen to fall on his birthday, but it wasn't actually* for his birthday) and the day after that we got to have our Harvest Market, or at least we got to have half of it until it got canceled due to rain!

​And since the weather started to cool down a bit, we got to resume all of our fun "it's not a million degrees out" activities like cask and sushi classes and also we got to release that collab beer that we brewed with CBC back in July (named Dada Processing, because it's very PoMo) plus we hosted The Office Trivia, Extra Hard Edition which included what is honestly a career-best stupid trivia prize.

And I know I said I was gonna stick to Only The Good Stuff in this year-end wrapup but I do feel the need to mention that it was around now that The City Of Everett ordered us - without cause - to stop all of our outdoor live entertainment. I'm not gonna get into it any more** than that, but it did kinda "set the tone" for the next few weeks; for instance, the show we'd planned with Death Ray Vision (to go along with the release of Unholy Water, our collab beer with them) got turned into a Band Hangouts night with pretty much zero notice, and also we had to seriously reconfigure a show that we had in...

...October when we had our first indoor show! Sure, the circumstances behind this show moving indoors were maybe not the best, but we were able to scramble together all the fixin's for a pretty rad time and we got to enjoy a buncha cool acoustic performances from Stephen Brodsky and Adam McGrath plus Marquis Lavoie, Hall Monitor, and T. Bloodhound and that honestly paved the way for a bunch more indoor shows in the weeks/months to come so something something silver lining! ​

Also in October we started up Mug Club Round Two (the first of many things in the taproom whose main impetus was "fuck it let's party") and we released our seven hundredth batch which we creatively named 700 and - following the (self-declared) success of our 666th batch, we decided to take that recipe and make it even more unmarketable (and when your starting point is "golden mild," it doesn't seem like there's much farther down that you can go) and speaking of tweaking beers to (at least in theory) make them less marketable, we also released Extra Funky which was Extra Naked but fermented with Brett C (credit where credit's due: this was Ben's brainchild) but the "unmarketable" aspect of that one kind of flopped because it ended up being one of the best beers we've ever made and while we're on about our brewers we should also mention that Macon got his paddle! The Bestowing Of The Paddle is an important tradition (to Jared) wherein people who have worked in production for a while get their own wooden brewing paddle - usually one that's built with a particular purpose in mind, but also that building has been implemented by somebody who is maybe not the world's best woodworker (i.e. Jared) - but anyway this paddle was made by somebody competent (Jared's dad, who built... most of the things at Bone Up that are made of wood, honestly) and anyway I got way distracted talking about that paddle so let's move on! ​

October also means we get to do all of our spooktacular Halloween stuff (and our decor honestly doesn't need to change much) so we did our annual Dog Costume Contest where the real winners are the people who get to look at dogs in costume all day and also we did our Beer and Candy pairings, only we did a slightly stripped-down version of them because literally everyone that works at Bone Up hates the free-for-all approach that we used to use in the past (turns out that if you make production employees come up with a chocolate and non-chocolate pairing for every beer on the menu, and then ask the FOH staff to find said pairings for hundreds of build-your-own flights, you're gonna encounter some resistance) but anyway it was hella fun and there was still much candy to be had (except the Twizzlers, nobody ever wants those)! ​

Oh! And October was also when we released South of Italy which was a very special wedding beer (the wedding was in November, we just got excited about releasing the beer) on account of how the happy couple met in our dang taproom and that kind of thing just warms our cold black hearts, which is good because those hearts were gonna need some warming in...

...November when we really started to "pull out all the stops" in terms of having music in the taproom! We started the month off with some metal (The Outlourdes, Blast Shield, and Sordid Spell) and then later in the month our Powerviolence friends in Sexless Marriage had their dang ol' album release show in our taproom (also featuring Dwelley and Wire Lines, who are decidedly not powerviolence bands but they're rad nonetheless and we like shows with variety)(also the guy who put the show together - one of the ones who ran "Obnoxious Trivia" several months back - neglected to tell the sound guy that he would in fact be the sound guy for the evening, so that made things super fun for a little while) and then we had a big ol' hardcore show right after Thanksgiving (Billy, Throw, Unhinged, Impulse Control)!

We still managed to cram in a lotta cool crap around all that! We had another hot sauce day and then we had Pulpo Day (a weekend devoted to one specific imperial stout, which is way more fun than it sounds) and our band collab for the month was a chai spice brown ale called Three Of Cups (a collab with the black metal solo project Sacral) and somehow we had six bottle releases for Shitty Wednesday (if you're counting the two beers that got rereleased in bottles, and we are) and we managed to publish our annual Thanksgiving Beer Pairings for (I think) the entire menu which we definitely did not think we would do on account of how we realized it was about to be Thanksgiving like two days before the day itself and we released one last batch of Wasted Life which was pretty impressive considering the fact that we had almost zero of the ingredients the recipe calls for, instead going all "Ship of Theseus" on it and subbing in other things for pretty much everything in the recipe (and yet even ol' Wasted Life's most vocal devotees didn't notice, which means we're either really good at this or they're really bad at noticing things, and we're pretty sure we know which one it is)...

... And anyway that wall-to-wall craziness is only set to increase in...

...December when honestly it really started to hit home that this was gonna be our last month, but we were still. Determined. To. Have. All. The. Fun. Dammit. And have fun we did! We held Horatio Day a month early and this was the first year that it had live music! Twice! We got to bring in a bunch of friends to play live music (The Weisstronauts and The Electric Heaters on Saturday, then DnA's Evolution and The Guilloteenagers on Sunday) and several of the bands wrote songs just for us (well, The Guilloteenagers wrote a song about us a couple years ago and they've been playing it ever since, but that's even better?) and that's not even the main point of Horatio Day, the main point of Horatio Day is barrel-aged beer! And also cake. But mostly beer! We'd been pretty much bottling constantly since we started prepping for Shitty Wednesday and that showed no sign of slowing in December, especially since our Horatio Day featured pretty much all of those big ol' boozebombs we'd been bottling up. ​

And after Horatio Day Liz and Jared hosted a night of Bone Up Trivia which was honestly mostly just an excuse to tell anecdotes about fun and/or memorable times at the brewery over the years, and then since we were pretty much entirely out of merch at that point we had Heads Up come back for another round of live screenprinting which overlapped with yet another show (Beneath Purgatory, Maidenhead, Dyhanna, and Vantablack) and then we had another show the day after that featuring a bunch of our favorite*** bands that had played here in the past (specifically Sundrifter and North Star the Wanderer and Ballast and Blue Manic) and at some point during all that madness we released, like, a jillion Critters beers because a) we didn't have time to make more blends, and 2) everything we had on hand worked really well as a single-barrel release (we moved away from single-barrel funky beer releases a few years ago because we tend to use small barrels, which means we would blow through different funky beers really quickly if we didn't combine them into larger blends. On one notable occasion, we went through an entire batch in a day and almost nobody on staff got to even try it) and also we released one last funky blend because we wanted to squeeze in one more wedding beer and that beer was Wolf Pup! ​

And then bringin' us right to the End Times we auctioned off all the hippos that had been hidden around the taproom (and also some art) and despite the fact that all of our knowledge of auctions came from "seeing fictional auctions on TV" it went fairly smoothly! Assuming, of course, that "attendees threatening each other with physical violence" fits within your definition of "smoothly," of course. ​

Anyway that was but a taste of the chaos that was to come at our End Of Days shows, with Glacier and Girih performing on Saturday the 30th along with Dregs Liquid Light Show (and holy hell was that an incredible show), then Goblet, Viqueen, Karate Steve and Graviton completely tore shit up on Sunday the 31st and we used the word "bittersweet" approximately ten million times over the course of those last few weeks/months, but that's really the best way to describe it at the end of things. We got to spend the weekend with all the friends we made over the years (including a few who came in from out of town just to see us) and we got to hang out and have fun and we were able to ignore the dark cloud hanging over our heads because getting together and doing cool shit is the reason we do this and it's the reason we've always loved doing what we do. ​

I've said goodbye to this brewery a thousand times and I feel like I've been writing different versions of the same damn epilogue on the blog every week for months, but I really can't overstate how lucky we are to have gotten to do this at all. We've made a ton of great beer and we've hosted a lot of fun events and most importantly we've just met so many great people - it's not always easy to meet people who are Your Kind of Weird, but we found a way to attract the right kind of weirdos (and confuse the crap out of a lot of other people in the process) and at this point all we can say is that we're glad we got to know you, and we hope we still get to see y'all around.****

* ...or was it? (No)
** OK fine I lied about not going into it more. In short, even though we weren't violating any laws or the terms of our permit, the city changed the terms of said permit because they "received some phone calls to code enforcement." Also of note, there's no official record of any complaints to any department (we submitted a FOIA request). Anyway, we're still more than a little unhappy about this, but also we're used to this kind of stuff from Everett.

*** The bands that played Horatio Day were also some of our favorite bands that have played here in the past. We've got a lot of favorites because we've worked with a lot of cool bands.

**** "Of course we'll stay in touch after summer camp!"