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2023: A Year in Numbers

1/31/2024

Hi friends! We'd like to start off with a big ol' Thank You to everyone who came out to our shindig at Remnant last week! It was hella rad to see so many friends, and if doin' cool collabs and events is what it takes to get this particular party started then I guess we're gonna have to keep doing cool collabs!

Thanks Adam and Rick for the pics! We had so much fun we forgot to take any photos, so if you have any you'd like to share, send 'em on over!

Anyway, without anything else of real substance to report on (at least not yet) we're just gonna get right into the third and final part of our 2023 retrospective (right on time as usual, running several weeks after everybody completely stopped talking/thinking about the previous year) and that's The Year In Numbers! And if you ain't been around this particular block before, the idea is pretty simple: we think back on the previous year and come up with as many silly stats as we can (and doing so this year gave us some ideas for a final Lifetime Numbers post that we'll try and get up next week. It'll be shorter/much less comprehensive, but there's a couple fun ones in there) and anyway let's get to it!

Production: By the Numbers

Number of batches brewed (total): 72
Number of double batches: 12
Percentage of batches brewed that were new beers: 57%
Amount of beer packaged, in gallons: 8,308

Number of flights that would fill: 53,171
Percentage of total volume actually served in flights: 5.5%
Amount of time, on average (assuming a 24/7 production schedule) it takes for Boston Beer Company to produce the same of beer we make in a year: 1 hour 26 minutes
Number of different beers packaged: 81
Number of new beers released: 65
Number of collaboration beers: 45

Number of wedding beers: 4
Highest number of beers released (or rereleased) in one month: 10 (tie between November and December)
Number of funky/wild beers released: 14
Number of "milkshake IPAs" brewed: 0, which is in fact the correct amount
Average OG of beer produced (in degrees SG): 1.054
Average ABV of beer produced: 6.0%
Highest ABV beer produced: Bone King (8.8%)
Lowest ABV beer produced: Key Lime (4.3%)
Amount of vodka, in gallons, it would take to make the same amount of alcohol we produced this year: 1,246

Beer brewed most often: Extra Naked
Number of Extra Naked batches brewed: 9 (three of which were double batches, also one had to get rebranded as Bad At Maths)

Ingredients: By the Numbers

Amount of hibiscus, in pounds, that was sacrificed to Henrietta this year: 40
Amount of hops used, in pounds: 360
Average hopping rate, in lbs/BBL: 1.30
Percentage of hops that were grown locally: 31%
Percentage of hops that were grown in Michigan, of all places: 32%
Number of hop varieties used: 39
Most used hop variety: Masscade (37#!)
Height, in feet, that you would need to grow all those hops on a single bine: 2,703
Amount of time, in weeks (assuming a 40-hour workweek), it would take you to pick all those hops by hand: 9

Amount of grain used, in pounds: 20,714
Number of individual grains that would be (approximate): 260,963,780
Percentage of grain that came from local suppliers: 12% (63% if you consider Delaware to be “local”)
Amount of oats used, as measured in bowls of oatmeal: 15,222
Amount of brown sugar used, also measured in bowls of oatmeal (but as a topping this time): 9,600
Amount of honey used, in pounds: 70
Number of bees it would take to produce that much honey: 38,920 (visiting approximately 140,000,000 flowers in the process)
Yeast harvested, in cells: 349,254,000,000,000 (plus another 19,716,000,000,000 or so from lab-grown yeast)

The Blog: By the Numbers

Number of words written in the blog: 69,778 (nice)
Number of pages that would fill in a paperback: 233
Least verbose month: July (4,320 words)
Most verbose month: November (8,081 words)
Top 3 most commonly used words in the blog (in order, other than "beer"): time, gonna, fun
Least commonly used words on the blog: play, percentage, comedy
Number of times we used the word "beer" in the blog this year: 475
Number of months "beer" wasn't the most-used word: 0
Number of times we managed to use the word "spooktacular" in the blog this year: 29

Taproom and Beer Garden: By the Numbers

Number of flights served: 2,964
Percentage of those flights that were served over Halloween weekend: 6%

Number of single to-go cans sold to people who definitely weren’t about to go drink in the parking lot: 95
Number of beers poured during our birthday weekend: 1,672

Number of dog costumes at our dog costume party: 15?
Percentage of those dogs that came with their own Instagram account: probably at least 50%

Number of times Landon was slapped in the face while working: only two, actually
Number of hot dogs served: 3,222
Number of cows it would take to produce that much beef: 0.92 (as in, we went through 92% of the beef you would get from a cow, in hot dog form)

Number of bands that played the Sunday of Horatio Day: 2
Number of bands that brought rubber chickens to play on stage the Sunday of Horatio Day: 2

Filed Under: "Holy Shit, How Did That Happen?"

Number of Horatio tattoos acquired: 11, plus one more Pulpo tattoo

Number of songs written about Bone Up: 3 (if you're being generous about how you're counting, which we are)

Beers Released in 2023

Parentheses indicates the rerelease of a seasonal/rotating/flagship beer.

January: Chalk Outline, The Hourglass, Critters 19, Happenstance, High Voltage, (Passion (Fruit) Project)
February: (Shut Up Kelly!), Fisticuffs, Horatio's Reserve, Sticky Fingers, Fool's Gold
March: Master of Extremity, (Extra Naked), Caustic Abomination, Shade Queen, Collateral Moshing, Boneheads III - Cerberus, (Joybringer), Light of Day
April: Supergroup, Patio Weather, (Fixation on Red Ale), (Henrietta)
May: Tom's Fault, Synthetic Dreams, Believe in Yourself, We're All Doomed, Ales of Demonic Possession, Cheeky Bastard
June: Django, (Stick The Landing), Bone King, (Key Lime White), Main Squeeze, Synhoptikon, (The Airness), This Is A Guilloteenagers Beer
July: Enigma, Blood Lightning, (Seven X's), RPM, Artificial Reaper, Joining the War on the Side of the Whales, Somergloom
August: Pale Glow, Brew Famine, Undercurrents, Cathedral of Trees, Hazy Spacey Jam, Bad At Maths, Kingslayer, God of Night
September: Unholy Water
October: 700, (Ginger Spectacular), The Blurst of Times, Calico, Extra Funky, Ginger Hootenanny, South of Italy
November: (Barreled El Pulpo), (El Pulpo), Sam's Elven Explosion, (Blue Manic), Three of Cups, (Joyrider), (Wasted Life), Biere de Krampus, Tears of Krampus, Close Encounters
December: Civil Disobedience for Losers, Critters 20, Critters 21, Critters 22, Critters 23, Critters 24, Critters 25, Critters 26, Critters 27, Wolf Pup

2023 Year in Review (Part Two)

1/22/2024

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!"

2023 Year in Review (Part One)

1/16/2024

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

In Which There Isn't Much to Discuss, But We Discuss Nonetheless!

1/10/2024

Hello again! Welcome back! We don't have a whole hell of a lot in terms of "content" on this run around the ol' blogsball diamond - we did get over our writers' block* enough to start writing the 2023 Year In Review, but it turns out that we need more than like one day to write that, so keep an eye out for that one next week!**

In the meantime, enjoy this low-res picture that Mug #17 sent us of our house drum kit's glow up!

And getting back to the here and/or now, we should at least mention the (currently theoretical) estate sale (which we put up on the blog last week and then quickly took down once our lawyer*** advised us that some of the things we were doing were "potentially illegal" or some crap like that). Anyway it turns out that there's an unexpected amount of red tape that we need to deal with before we can do that (and believe me when I tell you: the full story is very, very boring) so we're in a bit of a holding pattern for the time being. But rest assured! As soon as we figure out what the hell is going on around here, we will be most vocal about it!

In the meantime, please weep quietly at this picture of a semi-broken-down taproom.

Also, did you know that we've started putting homebrew-scale**** versions of our recipes up on the site? Well if you didn't know that, you do now! They're accompanied by a detailed (read: lengthy) look into the way we brew around here which definitely won't bore the pants off you, that's for sure. Anyway, if you dig those recipes and you wanna see more, just let us know! We've currently got Blue Manic, El Pulpo, Wasted Life, and Believe In Yourself on the To Do List, so holler if you wanna see more!

* Crippling depression
** It's going to be a bit more... curated than usual, since we don't want to (and to some extent can't) dwell on The Negatives from last year.
*** Not that lawyer, the other one. Turns out they're all specialists.
**** Technically we've been putting up the originals with our best-guess at the homebrew-scale version, but you get the idea.

In Which a Page is Turned

1/3/2024

Hello friends! We'd like to start off by offering a big ol' heartfelt Thank You to everyone who was able to make it out to our Last Weekend Ever.

And while we are... unhappy with the way the City of Everett decided to see us off,* we've honestly pretty much gotten used to the city being actively antagonistic towards us and right now we'd rather focus on the positives. And what positives they were - starting all the way back at the Hippo Auction (remember the Hippo Auction? That feels like it was forever** ago) it was just nonstop wall-to-wall good vibes and friendship and all that good shit. The auction was one of the most fun/chaotic times we've had in a long time and we definitely made a good call "playing it cool" on Friday because Saturday and Sunday were very very intense. They were incredible, but it turns out that spending two days partying full-steam-ahead with all your favorite people (some of whom came in from out of town just to hang out) and also having deep, heartfelt conversations with as many of those people as possible and then rocking out to some of the best, loudest, fastest bands ever until the cops show up and fuck it all up before we can even say "goodbye" or "thank you" to everyone who had come to see us off into the void - it turns out that that's a pretty intense experience. Words can't express how happy we are that so many awesome people came out to celebrate the end of the world with us, and even if they could I feel like at some point I'm just saying the same thing over and over again.

So. One more time: thank you. Thank you for all the times you've come to hang out and drink beers and color in the coloring contest and all the times we've gotten to meet your dogs and thank you for taking part in our weird trivia nights and tolerating the terrible prizes we give out and thank you for enjoying all the cask beers we've made and thank you for eating so many hot dogs and thank you for letting us brew beer for your band and thank you for brightening our days when you came by because we're always glad to see you - y'all are some of the coolest people we've ever met and we're incredibly lucky we've gotten to know you. Thanks for making us part of your lives, and thanks for being a part of ours.

We love you all, and we'll be back on the blog soon. <3

* In case you weren't there, they preëmptively sent out a police officer to stand around in the taproom for several hours before we closed, and then sent backup to arrive the minute it was time to get people to leave. The office on duty claimed that he was "part of a detail going to bars in the area," but that implies that other similar establishments would also have police detail (they did not). We're pissed about it - a lot of people were - especially because we weren't given any warning, but it does feel very on-brand for Everett.
** "Hurr hurr, it was last year." Shut up.