Whoa golly hot tamale has this been one heckin' dang of a week! Things got off to a hot start when we got our spanky-danky fresh-ass new taster glasses for when we serve up some tasty flights (which will happen eventually, I promise)! Then things got hot in a much more literal sense when we brewed some beer.

​Yes indeedy, after going through so many hoops and hurdles that a bunch of you out there in Internet Land probably started wondering if we were kidding about the whole "intending to brew beer" thing,* we finally (finally!) fired up our kettles for real! We've got some details below, Q&A style, but for now you should probably just feast your eyes on these here photos so that you can get yourself properly riled up to feast your mouth on our beers:

What beers did you brew?
As we mentioned previously, we wanted to start with some one-off batches to fine-tune our equipment and processes before we start in on our flagships. So for our first forays into the wide world of beer, we went with Honey & Hops (IPA) and Bone Smasher (Session IPA).**

When will these beers be ready?
If the initial batches meet our Quality Standards, we hope to have beer out in the wild within a week or two. If they do not meet our Quality Standards, expect beer around the time that you no longer hear sobbing coming from our building. 

Will your taproom be open once that happens?
I wish! But, unfortunately, not yet. We're bummed too.

So... when WILL you be open to the public?
Good question! That's really up to the contractors working on the outside of our building and/or the building department, who has some sort of fixation on making sure that people can get in and out of our building safely. So in other words, we still can't say, but things are moving along out there, which is something. 

If I can't get them in your taproom, where can I drink these beers?
That's... also a good question, actually. We're gonna be draft-only for a while, so the most general answer is "bars and/or restaurants," but we haven't narrowed it down much further than that. I'll spare you the boring details as to why,*** but suffice to say we're gonna start schleppin' samples and makin' awkward sales calls as soon as we've surely got suds to sling! So rest assured - you'll know where our beer is pouring roughly as soon as we do.

Is it that time of the week again? The time when we ramble about construction and dirt and chemical burns, all under the pretense that all this nonsense is leading toward us being able to make beer for your mouth?* It sure is!

And things are indeed movin' along - the location that formerly housed our dirt hole/pile is now a fancy new loading dock! It may not sound like much, but we're pretty psyched to be able to use the front door to the building again.

Admittedly, that's not the earth-shattering news we were hoping to deliver this week,** but it's sure as heck bringin' us closer to that goal! Our yeast is stocked, our equipment is prepped and tested and ready to rock (and we got us some fancy new chemical burns to prove it) - we are ready. We're sure as heck gonna make some dang ol' beer before you know it!***

While we're waiting for the final go-ahead from the city, we got us a Sensory Training Kit from the Siebel Institute to sharpen up the ol' palates! We want to make the best damn beer that we possibly can,**** and being able to detect and eliminate any unwanted flavors or aromas in our products is a pretty important part of Brewing Quality Beer (depending on how strictly you define that, you could argue that it's the only part of brewing quality beer).

​Anyway, the kit comes with a bunch of vials, each containing a different off-flavor, that you crack open and pour into some light beer which you then use to emotionally scar yourself. And oh man, we did we ever take a few for the team: the smell of isovaleric acid (AKA'ed as cheesy old hops) is still haunting our nostrils. Education!

What's more, our friends over at Original Gravity announced this season's concert lineup, and we're thrilled to say we're part of it! We's pleased as punch, we is - they've got a cool program and we're stoked to see what we'll be able to bring to it (and/or what they've got in store for us). For those of you not in the know, it's a concert series that pairs local composers with local breweries, which means we'll get to Get Weird in the brewhouse and make a beer to go with the music that'll be played. That sorta thing is right up our alley, so it should be a hoot!

Heyo! It's the blogginest time of the week, once again! Dirt progress has continued at a steady clip for most of the past week,* but this lovely weather we've been having lately has thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into things (it's about time we hit another unexpected delay; we start to get nervous if things go smoothly for more than a week at a time). In short: there's more concrete to be poured,** and that can't be done until things are reasonably dry in the sky.

So what does that mean for us? Well, nothing new, really. We were planning/hoping to start brewing in the near/immediate future (and we were hoping to be able to open to the public in the near-but-not-so-immediate future, but that's a bit more of a longshot), and that's been pushed back a bit (hopefully a very small bit, but who can say). But that's ok! We're making good use of the extra time by obsessively preparing for our impending First Brewday and - almost as importantly - making sure we spend our every waking moment panicking and frantically second-guessing every decision we've made up to this point. What fun!