And gettin' a bit further into the future, the following Friday, February 12th, we'll be doin' another Galentine's Day event! We're partnering with Boston GLOW again and we'll be doin' a (virtual) trivia event with half of ticket sales going directly to Boston GLOW and we'll be featuring some semi-secret beers that are about as seasonally appropriate as we get for holidays that we personally haven't made up, so keep them calendars peeled!

Grab your tickets here: Galentine's Trivia Night

* It's normal to reminisce about good times you've had with specific beers, right?

First on up is a new (double-ish) IPA called No Puns, Just Fun! And we're stoked about this beer in particular because, in addition to all the cool local grains we've come to know and love, this beer is our first brew using new-to-us hops from Champlain Valley Hops up in Vermont! We're generally pretty jazzed when we get hops from a new-to-us growing region* because growing the same hops in different places can yield crazy different results and we think that's cool as hell (the technical term for this is "terroir,"** should you ever need to demonstrate how bad you are at pronouncing French words). Anyway, for this particular beer we went with two tried-and-true Classic American Hops (specifically cascade and chinook - those hops grow pretty much anywhere, so we've gotten to try them from a handful of different regions) and we chucked a whole crapton of both of them into this beer and you'll get to try some on Friday!

And speaking of hanging out, this is our second-to-last reminder that in less than two short weeks we'll be celebrating one of our favorite made-up holidays: Horatio Day! It's our annual celebration of strong/barrel-aged/wild beers and/or a birthday party for a cartoon skeleton and we're gonna have four different (virtual) sessions over the course of three days (Friday evening through Sunday afternoon) and we'll be featuring fourteen different beers (four per session, with very few repeats) and there's gonna be a whole mess of tasty food and there's fancy glassware (we just got them in! They look so good!) and anyway all the cool kids are doing it or whatever so you should join us!**

Buy tickets for Horatio Day here: Horatio Day 2021 Sessions

* We say this as if he isn't currently working on a long convoluted outline that's clearly based off of one of those "photos connected by yarn" bulletin boards that you see on TV (we're told that's called a "crazy wall," but no). We're glad he's excited, but it's kind of unnerving how he keeps giggling like that. 
** This is not to say that we think of ourselves, personally, as "the cool kids." We are nerds, we just happen to be nerds about something that gets you drunk. 

​On Friday the 22nd at about 7 PM we'll be doing the first of two beer dinners, and the beers in question are a bunch of dark and brooding barrel-aged beers that all just so happen to be named after cryptids (either "real" ones or ones that we made up)! And since the obvious choice for food in this case is wild game, the food's all gonna be vegetarian! 
I'm kidding, of course - our friends over at Brato have whipped up a sumptuous-sounding array of wild game dishes for your snacking pleasure and it's gonna be a tasty time!

Tickets here: Session 1

​On Saturday the 23rd at about 3 PM we'll be easing into the afternoon with some funky beers and some cheese! This time around the beers are largely from our burgeoning wild fermentation program (plus one that's hella tart) and if you haven't gotten the chance to pair wild beers with a buncha cheeses, then let me assure you that you are in for a treat.

We don't have the cheeses themselves fully locked down yet, but the biggest hurdle is that every cheese pairing we've tried with these beers has been, at the very least, completely delicious. But that all translates to good news for you (and also us), so you should come check these cheeses out for yourself!

Tickets here: Session 2

Alright. Now that we got all the new beers and fun times outta the way, it's time for 2020 By the Numbers! If you're new around here, the skinny of the gist is that we look back on the previous year and come up with a bunch of weird statistics based on all the stuff we did over the past 12 months. And given how weird this year has been, you'd think there would be hella interesting data to crunch, but it turns out that "banning events" and "forcing everybody to sit quietly all the time" has a bit of a tendency to put a damper on most of the usual sorts of shenanigans. But! That won't stop us from crunching** those numbers nonetheless! So if you're feelin' numerical, read on!

* OK fine, it's Jared's favorite post to write because he thinks that "numbers are fun" (which is some Reading Rainbow shit, but here we are)
** If you were wondering, we do actually research these and make a bunch of spreadsheets to make sure everything is as accurate as possible. Our fact finding strategies range from "emailing people who are smarter than us" to "google searches, sometimes even clicking on two results for a consensus," to "counting."

Number of batches brewed: 98
Number of double batches: 27

Number of new beers brewed: 35
Number of batches of flagships brewed: 38
Number of batches of non-flagship recurring beers brewed: 17
Number of batches of "unreleased" beer made for aging and blending: 7

Amount of beer packaged, in gallons: 11,715
Number of flights that would fill: 74,976
Percentage of total volume actually served in flights: 8%

Number of different beers packaged: 74
Number of new beers released: 51
Number of collaboration beers: 13
Number of wedding beers: just one, right before people were told to stop gathering in groups
Highest number of new beers released in one month: 7 (tie between June and July). 
Largest number of beers available at one time: 26

Number of different beers put into bottles: 30
Number of bottles filled: 5,029
Number of different beers canned: 37
Total number of cans: 49,075​

Number of funky/wild beers released: 10
Number of funky/wild beers aging at the beginning of the year: 14
Number of funky/wild beers aging currently: 23

Beer brewed most often: Wasted Life
Number of Wasted Life batches brewed: 14, (four of which were double batches)​

Number of Key Lime batches brewed: 7 (five of which were double batches)  
Number of key lime pies that could have been made with that lime juice instead: 384
Number of actual key limes it would take to produce that much juice: 7,373​

Number of "milkshake IPAs" brewed: 0, which is in fact the correct amount
Number of beers named to make fun of one of our employees: at least one, that they know of. 
Number of beers in our "blithely pretending the world isn't ending" IPA series: 4

Amount of hops used, in pounds: 616.6 
Average hopping rate, in lbs/BBL: 1.63
Percentage of hops that came from local suppliers: 46%
Percentage of hops that came from Michigan, of all places: 7%
Number of hop varieties used: 28
Number of those that were new to us: 10
Most used hop variety: Rakau (88#!)
Height, in feet, that you would need to grow all those hops on a single bine: 4,628
Amount of time, in weeks (assuming a 40-hour workweek), it would take you to pick all those hops by hand: about 15, plus a couple extra days​

Yeast harvested, in cells: 581,378,000,000,000 (plus another 29,574,000,000,000 or so from lab-grown yeast)

Number of Girl Scout Cookie Flights served: 269
Number of boxes of Girl Scout Cookies we ordered at the beginning of the year: 240
​
Number of times "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" was played in the brewhouse: not enough. Probably only like a hundred. 

Number of people on staff who learned for the first time that apricots are not, in fact, dried peaches: 1 (how does this keep happening?)

Number of miles put on Jared's car from home deliveries: 5,286.7