Hi there, good to see you! Come pull up a chair at our blog, we've got some good things for you to look at this week! Admittedly, we never intended to spend all our time rambling about cool art that we bought from artists we like, but we just can't help ourselves!* Through a weird set of coincidences, this week has been the second consecutive Art Week around here and we just gotta share it with you!**

But first: the closest thing you'll get to Real News from us this week! As some of you may have heard (or more likely not, since you probably don't spend your whole day reading beer news like some of us do), there's a bit of a hop shortage goin' around these days. Rumor has it that this won't be as bad as the Big Hop Scare of '07, but it's still gonna put the squeeze on a lot of people who don't have a good supply locked down. I won't bore you with much detail about how the hop industry works, but most Big Boy Breweries buy contracts for their hops, often 5+ years in advance. And even if we could predict our future sales that far in advance (we can't), we're small enough that when we try to contract for hops we basically just get laughed at, which has made things a little tense around here. But never fear! We just ordered a whole shitload of state-grown hop goodness from our friends at Four Star Farms! Maybe even two shitloads! So not only will we be able to keep you fine folks in IPAs for a good long while, we'll be doing it with hops grown right down the road (it's a long road). 

​But anyway, starting off our list of new things that'll probably*** go in the taproom, we just acquired the original art from this strip drawn by the fantastic Dave Kellett! If you're not already familiar with his work, there's a lot to choose from - the art we bought is from his newspaper-style strip Sheldon, but there's also Drive (his sci-fi comic) and Stripped (a documentary about comic strips, which he put together). He's a busy dude, but everything he makes is High Quality and we're stoked as hell get out to (hopefully) hang up some of his work for all to see!

And there's more! We commissioned us another drawing of Horatio, this time by hirsute webcomic creator extraordinaire**** Randy Milholland! This one was a lot quicker than our last commission - we pretty much just handed him something with our logo on it and told him "feel free to get weird with it" (we also made a point of referring to Horatio as "dapper," which is something that will become relevant in a minute). An hour or two later, it was done! His only comment was "I didn't really know where you wanted me to go with this, so I made him a strongman," and personally I completely love that there's some direct link in Randy's mind between "dapper" and "loincloth." Anyway, as with all the artists we've been working with/buying from, we're huge fans of his work, so if you like things that are good then you should check out Something*Positive!

Next up, we* had the fine folks over at The Electric Moon make us a sign for our taproom! This was a bit of an impromptu addition to our oeuvre (it all started because Jared wanted the bay door to read "Made From Ingredients" with an arrow pointing toward the door in lieu of any actual information), but we're pleased as punch that we've got it!

Lastly and far from leastly in this week's List O' Things You'll See in the Taproom is a custom drawing by one of our favorite cartoonists - Sam Logan! We'll spare you a full-on review of his work since that's kind of beyond the scope of this blog, but suffice to say: a) you'd be doing yourself a favor to read Sam & Fuzzy if you don't already,** and 2) we'll probably definitely have some of his books laying around the taproom for you to peruse. Anyway, Mr. Logan was patient enough to decipher our excited/incoherent ramblings*** into a spirited (and strikingly accurate) rendering of our taproom! You'll recognize Horatio and El Pulpo tending bar, of course, and the rest of the patrons are characters from Sam & Fuzzy. It's so cool!

Hello again, and welcome back to our blog! Since we spent much of last week focusing on things that are, shall we say, less than thrilling,* we decided to "kick things into high gear" and focus on some of the more "sexy" details of our "ongoing renovations." That's right: furniture restoration. 

If you've been to pretty much any bar that's opened within the past five years or so, you may have noticed a trend toward a style that I'll call "industrial chic," which is largely achieved by spending thousands of dollars to manufacture furniture that looks like it was made out of old garbage (I believe the industry term is "repurposing"). Well, we don't have that kind of cash, so we're cutting out the middle man and going with a style that Jared calls "thrift store couture" (a phrasing he uses in the vain hope that nobody will realize he doesn't know what those words mean). Rather than making our tables out of old anvils or something,** much of our furniture is "repurposed" from furniture that used to be much crappier. And amidst all the sanding and spraying and swearing, we learned an important lesson: there is an excellent reason why sane people pay good money to not have to do this. We're still far from done, but we've at least gotten some of it to look like it isn't garbage (progress!), so check it out!

In the meantime, we've also been putting in some time working on our tap handles (remember those?) which have been repurposed from, um, trees (OK fine, I'll stop now). Those ain't done yet either, but we did some science to a bunch of wood and managed to not get any serious burns on any major body parts, so keep an eye out for some eye-catching tap handle goodness in the near future!

In other news - more specifically, news that we forgot to mention last week (an omission that is made all the more glaring when you consider the amount of detail we put into such less-pressing topics as What Jared Thinks About Dust) - our new friends over at MetroRock put up a poster for us! That's damned neighborly if I do say so myself. So if you're in the Everett area (especially "The Village," which is apparently what our neighborhood is called?) and you get a hankerin' to do some climbing (or I guess if you just want to look at that sweet poster that Jimbo done up), you should check them out!

Well hello there! It sure has been a big week around here at Bone Up! First off, we got the chance to meet some of the fine folks down at city hall, and they've been mighty welcoming every time we've talked to them. One of the people we met with was rather insistent that the mayor would be at our grand opening! The mayor could not be reached for comment on this issue (we assume that his promised attendance at our brewery would be news to him as well). 

Furthermore, this here marks the second week in a row that our building has seen real, actual, progress! As regular readers of this blog have heard a few times before (and as you've heard at length if you've run into us in the wild, particularly after we've had a drink or two), we've had some issues with our roof which have delayed some of our buildout by weeks and possibly months. We've tried not to harp on it too much, but that thing has been the bane of our collective existence for some time now so it's hard not to bring it up from time to time. But not anymore! Maybe! After redoing the damn thing for what might be the third or fifth time, the roof has at the very least stopped leaking on days when it isn't raining (we currently can neither confirm nor deny whether or not it leaks when there is rain, but that's fine for now. Baby steps). It might not sound like much to get excited over, but a lot of our other renovations had to be put on hold until that got done. But now things can really get moving - as we speak we're getting some new flooring put in, and they've taken most of that big stupid metal thing* off of our ceiling!

Well hey there! If you've recently been past the coolest yet-to-open brewery on Norman Street in Everett, then odds are you've spotted the latest addition to Bone Up Headquarters. I'm not really sure why you would be going by there, unless you happen to really like looking at discarded pallets (and who doesn't!), but that's beside the point for now. The point is: we got us some signage! 

OK, so it's technically not a "sign" so much as it is a "painted door", but still - it looks hella good! Now every time you go down Norman Street to feast your eyes upon the Great Trash Pile in our parking lot, your gaze will be met by none other than that of our logo character (mascot? whatever) - Horatio Skellingham!*

And that's not all! Oh, wait. Yes it is.