Howdy-do kids and squids! It's time for yet another roundup of all the fun stuff we got comin' atcha this week, so read on and read up! 

First up on that dang ol' docket is a new beer that's coming out at some point this week (probably Friday, maybe Saturday) and that's Comfy Pants! We took our beloved Lazy Pants and decided to "remix" the recipe, and now we've got this tasty-ass farmhouse with a buncha chocolate and a spoonful of blackberry and a whisper of vanilla and it's good as heck and it'll be available in cans and on draft soon, so you should come have some with us! ​

Oh! And! Lastly! For real this time! It's a new month, which means a new coloring contest, which means the announcement of the winner and runners-up from January!

And moving on into "clean" barrel-aged beers we've got a terrific trio to shout about, so hold on to your hats!

First up is Jam Session which is a very barrelly Belgian barleywine that spent a good long time in a bunch of whiskey barrels from our friends over at Short Path and whoo-ee is it tasty! It's packin' a buncha that dark fruit and sweetness that you'd expect and then there's just a whack of whiskey hiding right behind it and anyway it's in bottles right now and it'll be on tap at some point and it's good and you should have some! ​

​And movin' back a bit into the here and/or now and/or future-ish times, we've got some stuff goin' on this weekend that we gotta tell you about! 

First on up, this week's trivia night (cult classic movies) will be postponed until Thursday February 24th for reasons you can probably guess. Also we won't be having a popup on Friday, though that one seems like the decision was precautionary rather than reactionary. But! Never fear! Simpsons trivia is probably still on schedule for next Thursday so you'll still be able to get trivial, you'll just have to wait a little bit. 

And while we're on the whole "moderate bummer" tip, we should probably mention that we won't be tapping a cask this week. What with all the stuff getting canceled left and right,* we figure it makes a bit more sense to make casks a Sometimes treat, so we'll be back next week with more cask goodness! 

Anyway, moving on into the weekend, we've got HotChix back in the house on Saturday! They'll be swingin' through and dishin' out some deliciousness from 6-10, so come on by!

And then this Sunday is the first Sunday in a while that we haven't hosted a sushi class, so instead we're hosting a calligraphy class! More specifically, Sip & Script is in the house to teach you how to write words real good (the lessons also come with supplies) and it sounds pretty rad and you should come check it out!

We may be sold out of tickets at the time of writing, but you can double check that here:
Sip & Script Calligraphy

* At this rate we should probably bring back virtual events, even if it's just the low-key Friday night ones we used to do. 

In case you hadn't heard from one of our various social medias, we were closed yesterday (Tuesday) because we had a staff member test positive for covid. Honestly, you've probably definitely heard this song-and-dance from a buncha different places already, but the gist of it is that we want to keep our staff and customers to be as safe as possible so we're making sure that people get tested and we're just all-around following the CDC guidelines on how we're supposed to handle this. (As an aside, the CDC guidelines have... changed substantially since the last time we had to read them. They used to say something like "everybody has to isolate in an underground bunker for a month after any possible exposure" and now they kind of just say "get back to work," which is either encouraging or terrifying depending on how you look at it. Though it's probably not a great sign that the official guidelines called us "a bunch of entitled millennials"). Anyway the point is that we're doing everything we can to keep safe - everybody who tested positive is at home with mild symptoms, and they'll stay away from work until they test negative. We're back up and running in the taproom, and everybody on the schedule right now is testing negative and we sure as heck aim to keep it that way!​

And now it's the time that nobody has been waiting for: time for the Year In Numbers! If you're new around here, the gist is that we look back on the past year and come up with a bunch of interesting and/or silly stats about what we did over the course of the year. We think it's a fun way to put the past year into perspective (or at least Jared does, because he thinks that "numbers are fun" like a completely normal person) and we had meant to come up with some five-year stats* since 2021 was our fifth full year in operation. But then... well, you (presumably) read the blog post up top, you can see how maybe some things might get deprioritized. And we thought about pushing that to next week, but... January 12th is already too late in the year to be running retrospectives. It's kind of weird to be reminiscing about the past year in what is effectively February. Anyway, that's really neither here nor there and now I'm just throwing a bunch of words at you when I promised numbers so here's the numbers!

* Some examples:
Number of actual, literal dumpster fires: 2
Number of times our back fence caught fire: 1
Number of staff members who learned, for the first time in their adult lives, that apricots aren't just dried peaches: 2

Number of different beers packaged: 77
​​Number of new beers released: 61
Number of collaboration beers: 19 (10 if you don't count band beers for our birthday party)
Number of wedding beers: only one (again), but that's scheduled to increase next year
Highest number of beers released (or rereleased) in one month: 9 (April)
​Number of funky/wild beers released: 6
Number of "milkshake IPAs" brewed: 0, which is in fact the correct amount

​Top 3 most commonly used words in November (in order, other than "beer"): time, suggest, pairs (with "pulpo" as a close runner-up)
Number of times we used the word "beer" in the blog this year: 659
Number of months "beer" wasn't the most-used word: 1 (only January, when it was "number" for reasons you can probably guess)
Number of times we managed to use the word "spooktacular" in the blog this year: 24

​March: 
No Light Ever
Driller's Brew
(Wellington)
RBG

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! ​

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!

...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! ​

...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! ​

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! ​

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! ​

...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. ​

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. ​