Things are happening! News is existing! History is being made! 

By which of course I mean that we got our gen-u-wine official Bone Up growlers. Check out how good they look!

But wait, there's more!

We've also started getting shipments of merchandise, so pretty soon you'll be able to buy glassware and clothing with our logo all over it. We're working out the finer details of setting up an online store (y'know, little things like "how do I do this"), but keep an eye out for some merch from us within the next couple weeks.

And. And! Construction has started on the building we'll be brewing in. Rad times! We unfortunately don't have any pictures of that at the moment because:

a) They're apparently putting in the lights last, so all our pictures would be dark and blurry.

2) Even if there were lights, it would mostly look like torn down drop ceilings and holes hastily knocked through sheetrock walls, because that's the bulk of what's been done so far. I didn't know that sledgehammering the walls took precedence over being able to see, but I guess that's why I'm not a professional construction guy.

Until next week, you keep on keepin' on and we'll keep on Bonin' Up!

It's that time of the week again! And wouldn't you know it, we still ain't got no significant updates for you (what can we say? We're moving at the speed of government right now, whether we like it or not). However, when we're not ranting about beer, there's quite a bit of doodling that goes on behind the scenes 'round these parts. We thought that you, our scholarly readers, would be interested in the decisions behind the bones (and mayhaps you'll take comfort in the fact that we do give our graphics a nonzero amount of thought). 

As our three long-time readers will recall, BUBco has undergone a few face lifts over the last year. We had quite the time brainstorming all sorts of funky ways to visually express our original name: trying to come across as unique, handcrafted, genuine, and [insert meaningless marketing-speak here] as possible. The first version of our logo was well-liked, but after several hundred unsuccessful attempts to use it on something (anything), we realized it just wasn't up to snuff. 

Variations of the skull/mustache theme have been the only constant throughout the process - the original logo had more traditional detail to it, with cheekbones and teeth (you know, all that fun stuff that logos totally need). But after a couple months, we let it go for a simpler version (it was difficult to make out the details at a small scale, and that unintended leer kept us up at night). 

After a brief return to the drawing board, the second (and mostly current) iteration of the logo surfaced. The skull got softened and cleaned up a bit and we made his face more expressive (no easy task since we pulled out all his teeth). We ditched the fancypants lettering and replaced it with some hop-and-grain crossbones under the skull, and voila! Our new logo was born!

While we look back fondly at Version II, when we went through our name change and rebranding process a few months back, we dropped the crossbones for a less cluttered look (we obviously kept the dreamy, pensive eye sockets).  

Bonus! Here's an glimpse into some beery doodles from Jimbo's oddball mind. Trust us, these will start to make a lot more sense once you see the cool stuff we're gonna draw all over our labels.

We've been so wrapped up in work and holiday travel and god-knows-what-else that we sort of lost sight of what Bone Up is all about: filling out paperwork until we want to claw our eyes out! And, almost as importantly, the thing that allows us to fill out all that paperwork: brewing. And this week's brew is one we've been itching to make for weeks because this time we got to play with the new (well, new to the commercial brewing world, not new new) Neomexicanus hops! 

We hadn't heard of them until very recently, but they're quite the interesting find. The short-and-oversimplified version of the story is that most if not all of the hops used in commercial brewing nowadays are predominately or entirely of European origin (hop parentage is kind of wacky, so you'll often get hops that have like 17% American ancestry). But hops grow everywhere! Given the right conditions they'll grow like weeds, not unlike a certain genetic cousin of theirs: Weed (I assume most of you already know this due to the fact that it's the #1 "tee-hee" joke on brewery tours, but I will still caution you not to smoke hops because you will just get a terrible headache if you do). So anyway, some guy out in New Mexico found these crazy weird hops just growing outside and he started cultivating them and now they're grown and sold by a monastery (for further reading, we strongly recommend this Smithsonian article and if you're still interested maybe look at this blog post).

As you may have guessed, we think it's just the bee's knees that we get to brew with these hops (the cones grow in multiheaded bunches! Like a hydra! Or... grapes). We've always been fascinated by the farmhouse brewing tradition - beer used to be just a food product and people made it out of whatever was easy and/or cheap to get (while we love the idea, we try not to use the word "farmhouse" to describe our beers since our brewery is in an industrial park, which is about as far on the other side of the spectrum as you can get given that it's neither farm nor house). And it doesn't stop at the old-timey throwback beers like the Norwegian beers made with spruce branches or colonial-era American beers made out of pumpkins and squash - many of the beer styles you know and love stem from brewers trying to deal with environmental and/or political factors. For instance:

-English beers tend to be low in alcohol because of taxes imposed on brewing ingredients during the World Wars - they used to be hella strong back in the day.
-Belgian beers tend to be dry and cloudy because a tax was placed on the size of the mash tun, which meant brewers had to use thick mashes and lots of sugar (somewhat counterintuitively, sugar leads to a drier beer instead of a sweeter one).
-American Mainstream Beers use corn and rice because domestic barley is very high in protein, which makes a beer that's relatively thick. Adjuncts were used to lighten the body and make it more palatable to people who were accustomed to European beer (that's right! It's not because the Big Brewers are cheap! Maybe next time you shouldn't get all your Historical Beer Facts from a Sam Adams label). 

In conclusion, this long rambling story is a great example of why we don't let our head brewer write blog posts more often.

Well, not every week can be a banner news week; and this past week brought ho-hum news in spades. With that in mind, we take a medium amount of pleasure in reporting to you the current happenings at Bone Up Brewing:

-Our federal brewer application had its status changed to "accepted for processing." It is unclear why this took a month.
-We bought, like, two hundred feet of tubing.
-We conducted a fair amount of "market research" in the form of "going to breweries and/or bars." We won't bore you with pictures because we didn't take any.
- Jimbo has been tapping away on the computer making things for your eyeballs.

Check back next week for more scintillating updates!