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In Which Everything is Changing, Except For the Things That Aren't

5/26/2021

Howdy-do friendaroos! We've got a whole buncha fun taproom rule/policy changes now that the Official Government Policy has abruptly changed to "let's pretend like covid never happened," but that's a whole buncha nitty gritty so we figured we'd start with the fun part and that's beer!

And hot dogs!

And first on the ol' docket is something that's not actually beer at all, but which is beer-related so we'll just roll with it and that's holiday hours! This upcoming weekend is one of them "long weekends" that we keep hearing so much about* and anyway that means that Monday May 31 we will be open from 12-8!

We set out to make an entirely new party-themed ginger farmhouse blend for you (we even had a name locked and loaded) and then during our group tasting we accidentally ended up right back at the Disco. Sooo... enjoy round two!

And moving on to actual beer, we're stoked to announce the rerelease of a beer that was a fast favorite around these parts: Ginger Disco! We took our beloved ginger farmhouse and aged it in a bunch of blueberry liqueur barrels (specifically Summer Reserve barrels from our friends at Short Path) and whoo-ee is it tasty and it's on tap and in bottles right now and we sure do recommend that you getcha some!

Fruity and fabulous!

And. AND. On top of the return of the disco, we're also releasing this year's Pride beer! This time around we took a nice 'n light lil' session beer and dumped a crapton of pomegranate in it and it's gonna be in cans and on tap starting on Friday!

wE bEaT u CoViD LoL

And that's it for beer, so now we get to get to all the fun rule changes! Now, as you may have heard 5,000 times already, the governor recently announced that all covid-related restrictions and policies and whatnot are being rolled back on May 29th. But! It turns out that's an exaggeration - some of the rules/restrictions are still hanging around, albeit in a more relaxed form (though we're not 100% clear on which rules are staying, or how relaxed they are). And on top of all that, we're also under the jurisdiction of the ABCC (who are essentially the Beer Police) and the City of Everett and they both also changed-but-didn't-quite-remove a bunch of rules and they seem to have put a lot of effort into making sure that there is no possible way for us to know what the hell is going on, which is going to make things pretty fun.

So! Without any further hemmin' or hawin', here's a list of what is gonna change and what ain't gonna change (yet), at least as far as we can figure:

What is changing:

There's no more mask mandate, so that means you ain't gotta wear one if you don't want to. We still encourage you to wear a mask if you're in a crowd, but that might just be because we feel naked without ours.
Group size limit has been increased to ten (from six). But with that being said, we won't be rearranging any furniture to accommodate larger groups (our biggest tables seat six, eight if you're very comfortable with each other). So in other words, if you wanna roll deep you'll need to split up.
No more signing in. As entertaining as it is to hear people fret about how "the government" is tracking them, we're not taking names anymore which means that the gubbermint will need to get your phone number some other way.
There's no more food requirement. As much as we were really hoping to sell an entire cow's worth of hot dogs this year, we no longer need to pretend to be a restaurant, so now it's your choice if you want to eat several hot dogs or not (what a concept)!
Beer delivery has to stop once the State of Emergency ends on June 15th. We think that's kind of silly (there's no compelling reason not to allow us to deliver beer), but that's not gonna be the hill we die on so we'll just roll with it.

What isn't changing (yet):

Our staff will still be wearing masks, at least for the nearish future. We're all vaccinated, but we get that not everybody is comfortable with sudden reversals in policy, so we'll do what we can to help you ease back into "normalcy."
We'll be holding off on reintroducing communal games. Frankly, this is as much about safety as it is about not wanting to clean Battleship pieces out of our parking lot for the next couple of months.
We're keeping table service and holding off on bringing back bar seating. This is partly logistical (it would be a train wreck if everybody in the beer garden had to order at the bar) and partly because we're still not the most jazzed about crowded indoor spaces (and also very few people opt to sit inside when it's nice out anyway, rendering that issue moot for a while). It's also probably worth mentioning that we're only allowed to do "seated service" anyway, but that's in line with what we're already doing.
We will continue not having a dance floor, which was pointedly mentioned by the ABCC (in general, not to us specifically).

So in other words, everything is changing, except for all the things that aren't.

Make sense? Cool. Our heads are spinning just like everybody else's are, but we've gotten through weirder crap than this, so we'll just post up at a picnic table with a buncha beers and hot dogs and ride this one out like we always do. Cheers!

* I heard that some of you guys get days off? How do you get days off, I want days off.

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In Which the Government Just... Goes For It

5/18/2021

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Alrightyroo kiddos and squiddos, it's been three whole weeks since we've gotten any Big News from the state about how every single rule and regulation is changing (again) on a moment's notice, which means we're due* and hoo-ee is this a biggun! And since we're light on beer news this week anyway (which will very much not be the case next week), we're gonna cut right on down to the brass tacks and get right into it:

Secret's out: the sunsets from our beer garden are top notch.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that you haven't heard, it was announced the other day that pretty much all restrictions on everything everywhere in Massachusetts are being lifted on May 29th. And, true to style, the official statement included helpful phrasing like "officials also recommend fully vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear a face covering or social distance indoors or outdoors except for in certain situations.” So... you don't need to wear a mask, unless you do. Got it? Got it. But on the plus side, they did make a point of specifically saying that ball pits can reopen, which is something we were deeply worried about.

I mean, where eLsE would we be shotgunning cans of Wasted Life

Anyway, while we are looking forward to a (hopeful) decrease in the number of grown-ass adults throwing tantrums about the (largely reasonable) rules we have to enforce, it does bear mentioning that our entire beer garden was created and set up to comply with covid safety guidelines. So in other words, that means we're gonna have to change some things, probably lots of things, but we kinda sorta have no idea what will change or how since this pretty much came out of the blue and we only have like a week to figure it out.

We will definitely not be hiding on top of the cold room eating snacks while we figure this out

I guess this is just a long-winded way of saying that we also have no idea what the hell is going on, but you probably already knew that. Anyway, we're gonna get to figurin' on that and we'll let you know as soon as we do!

P.S. We (with lots of other cool brewers from all over!) contributed to an article about homebrewing and the folks behind that site asked us very nicely to mention them in their blog, so here is an article about homebrewing. If you're looking to get into it as a hobby and need a good FAQ or equipment list, it's a good read!

* It seems that we're getting new and sweeping changes every three weeks this year, as opposed to last year's two week Drastic Change Cycle.

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In Which We Celebrate Five Years

5/12/2021

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"Also in Which You Get an Up Close and Personal View of Our Faucets"

Howdy friends! We've got us an extra-special blogjam this week where we get all misty-eyed about things that pretty much nobody else cares about (which, if we're being honest, is probably the dictionary definition of "blog," but we digress), but first we gotta get on with the here and now, so here's the now!

We would show you a picture of the beer, but Modern Draught is cleaning the lines right now so we can't pour anything and we really should be watching the brewday instead of writing rambly captions so here is a picture of our funky barrels

First on up, we've got a brand-spankin'-new wild beer release that's draft only and available right now and that's Critters XII! Now, I know we said we were gonna tone it down on the numbered "Critters" releases in favor of larger batches of wild beers that have their Very Own Names, but sometimes we empty a barrel that's so damn tasty that we don't want to blend it with anything else, and so this time around it's a lovely little grisette that got a bucket's worth of buckwheat honey and it somehow ended up tasting kinda like strawberries and anyway we kegged it up and tapped it up and now you can drink some!

We've missed you.

And speaking of drinking, for the first time in 400+ days, we've got some indoor seats! Now, we're not goin' too buckwild here - our taproom is basically a wind tunnel if we've got the bay door open (which we will, right up until Octoberish) - but things are actually gettin' a bit safer out in the world and we figured we'd set up a place that's comfortable even if it's raining out (how outlandish! So 2019!). We're still keeping distance between all the tables and the walkways and all that safety stuff that has been a Major Priority for us over the past 419 days or so (we're not counting, you're counting), but we felt like we were ready for this step and now there's more seats!

(We still haven't fixed the window)

And lastly, as an addendum to this week's blog, we've got a bit of a Big Day coming up that means a lot to us behind the scenes - this Friday is the fifth anniversary of our first-ever Bone Up brewday! And this year we'll be doing what we do every year, which is nothing.

That's a virgin ass kettle right there

But seriously. It's been five years since we've brewed our first batch, and dang but if we don't get a little teary-eyed just thinkin' about how far we've come. For those of you who have been with us since the Old Times (which, considering the audience for this blog, is most of you), this story will probably be pretty familiar, but we're gon' tell it anyway...

Look at these kids with their dark bitter IPAs in shaker pints

Five years ago our production team* was just Liz and Jared (henceforth referred to as "we," since we're the ones who write the blog), and it was - to be perfectly frank - a fairly nerve-wracking occasion when we fired up the ol' brewhouse for our First Ever Brewday. We only had a couple years of professional brewery experience between the two of us, and our "test brew" on the new brewhouse (it's common to do a "dry run" using water) was maybe a little bit of a disaster. Long story short, several things melted - some to the point that they were permanently fused with other parts of the brewhouse - so we were maybe a bit gun-shy with the ol' burners for a little while.

I'll spare you most of the boring details about that fateful first brewday (we tried measuring out yeast nutrient using a scale set to a unit that we didn't know existed,** one of the hoses exploded while filled with hot water, Jared dropped the Official Brewing Spoon, etc.), but the point is that at the end of that day, after we cleaned the trub out of our hair and changed into socks that weren't soaked in wort and chemicals and put ointment onto our various burns, it felt like we had really Accomplished Something. After years of buildout and permitting hell and putting together janky-assed systems*** because that was the best equipment we could afford, we were finally a Functioning Brewery.

And like we do for most of the big moments around here, we took a deep breath and tried to appreciate the gravity of the situation or whatever, but mostly we just looked at each other and said "okay, what's next?"

And that's not to say that we were so focused on Moving Forward that we couldn't stop to smell the roses, but more that we were acutely aware of how every new development had a tendency to add more line-items to our exponentially-increasing to-do lists. We'd set so many things in motion at that point that all we could do was keep moving - we were kind of like sharks, only stupider.

oMg PrEmIuM aLe

Anyway, if we're being perfectly honest, the beer that came out of that first brewday was hardly the best beer we've ever made (and our second batch was worse, but that's a story for another time), but it was still the first real tangible result of the months and years that we put into starting this brewery, and it'll always be something we look back on fondly.

And that's probably why we've never tried to throw a Made Up Holiday around this particular milestone (though we do certainly love making up holidays), because it's essentially the turning point when this turned from a personal passion project into something that we were sharing with The World. That, and we try not to raise a big fuss about brewdays in particular - that's our job, it's just something we do.

Unrelated: Joybringer is back in bottles

But also, as an aside to our aside, commemorating that brewday has had a bit of an unseen ripple effect on our beer menu that's still evident today. See, the first ever batch of Joybringer was brewed as a sort of brew-birthday present to/from ourselves. And Joybringer ended up being the base beer for our first-ever barrel-aged beer release (which was named Jollybringer, and we only had like one keg of it), and Joybringer is the base for our first-ever mostly-year-round barrel-aged beer (Joyrider), and also Joybringer is so good you guys.

Look at these kids with their tallboy hazies

But! That's enough of our navel-gazing trip down Memory Lane, except to say that we are absolutely stunned at how far we've come in such a short time. Five years ago, we were brewing beer into plastic tanks and bringing growlers to bars as product samples (which, if we're being honest, did not go over super well) and we had no idea if anybody would want to come out to our taproom, assuming it were to open at some point. And now we've got a crew of great people working for us and we're putting out a bunch of tasty beer and serving it in our rad beer garden and we've got two different barrel-aged beer programs going as side-projects and we're selling cans in stores and we've got a bunch of friends that come visit us and drink beers on the regular and to say the least the past five years have exceeded the wildest expectations that we even dared have when we set out to start this ridiculous brewery and we're just incredibly grateful that we've gotten to share the experience with so many great people and anyway we're gonna keep on keepin' on as long as we can, so we'll see you in the taproom!

* And our sales team, and our delivery team, and our general contractors, and our bookkeepers, and et cetera.
** "Grains"
*** Our original brewhouse pumps were SO TINY.

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In Which We Keep on Crushin' On

5/5/2021

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Hi kids! We're keepin' things short 'n sweet around here in Blag Land this week on account of how our draft list is lookin' mighty full (except for our wild beer line, and we hope to have news on that front shortly) and our can/bottle fridge is hella brimmin' fulla goodies and there haven't been any weird proclamations from The Government this week so we figured we'd take a breather for a couple days in terms of releasing new beers, like a buncha roustabouts* or something and anyway here's some bits and bobs and then we'll be on our merry way!

And first on up, it behooves us much fortitude to say that Wellington is back! We're so fond of this beer that we decided we'd keep it kickin' around for most/all of the summer and then we promptly ran out of it because it turns out that y'all are also mighty fond of it (and/or because we're bad at planning, but let's keep it positive here) and anyway it's back on draft and in cans and you should come drink some!

...aaand it's also worth noting that we won't be tapping a cask this week; we tried to fill a cask with Cone Crusher, but there was... an incident. Anyway, cask will be back next week!

* I don't actually know what a "roustabout" is.

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In Which Everything is Changing, Except For the Things That Aren't

In Which the Government Just... Goes For It

In Which We Celebrate Five Years

In Which We Keep on Crushin' On

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