First on up, which is to say right about right now, is the long-awaited* release of our newest wild beer (which is to say, our newest Spawn Of Critters), and that's Kegasus! Kegasus is a blend of several different beers of varying vintages, and it manages to be an alluring array of contradictions: it seems sweet, yet it's bone dry; it's not shy with the funk, but it's very approachable; it's light on the palate, yet mysteriously dark and brooding. Anyway, we feel like we're really hittin' our stride on the ol' funky beers, so this is one we're pretty durn proud of and now we've got it in bottles and on tap and you should come try it!

Oh! And! In other exciting news, have we mentioned that we've fired up our new fleet of heat lamps to keep you toasty? Thassright, we're trying to keep patio season going as long as possible this year, so don't be shy about coming out to grab a little slice of paradise while the gettin' is good!

First and/or foremost, we'd like to extend the sincerest of thank-yous to all of y'all who made it out to our birthday "party" on Saturday! It may not have been the pretty princess prancing pony party we were envisioning (we had so many ideas! Like maybe hiring an actual sound person for the bands! Or setting up an actual stage! Or hiring a clown to follow Chris around and annoy him all day!), but in the end we still got to drink tasty beers and eat good food and we got to see a bunch of friends, and in the end that's really why we're doin' all this in the first place, so we'll call it a success. In other words: thanks for coming out, it was good to see you. ​

Lastly, we should probably (sigh) talk about the fact that we recently made the news for the second** time*** in the past three weeks. It's a bummer of a situation, and we're not generally the "air our dirty laundry in public" type, but this all pertains to a public health issue so it's really not our place to keep mum, is it? 

Anyway. As we were about to start prepping to open on Monday, we got a call from somebody who said that they had been in our beer garden on Sunday, and that they (or somebody in their party, we're not 100% clear but also that's not an important detail) had recently tested positive for covid...

...they were seated at the table farthest from all the other tables. You know, the one that's way up in the corner on the patio and kinda bunched up over there (i.e. the one farthest from the stairs)? The "it's better than nothing" table? That one. Going from the notes we took and the information they gave us, it looks like it was a party of four that was there from about 2:30-3:30...

...once we found out what had happened, we called everybody who had been at the nearest table during/after their visit, as well as the people who sat at that table after them (several hours later, mind you). That ended up being a grand total of two or three parties (again, it's not our most sought-after table)...

...to be perfectly frank, we're confident enough in our safety measures that we don't believe anybody (staff or customers, excluding the other people at that table) would have been at risk. If you think about it, all of the safety protocols that we currently employ were put in place for exactly this reason. But since we like to get knowledge from knowledgeable people rather than our own conjecture, we sought opinions from somebody smarter than us (in this case, a doctor), who confirmed our suspicions that risk to others should be minimal (and who also pointed out that there are valid reasons why the customer in question might have had no reason to believe that they might be covid-positive)...

...but, since we pride ourselves on a) transparency, and 2) going overkill on sanitation/safety, we felt that it would be best to close for the day on Monday and scrub the everlovin' hell out of anything and everything in the beer garden/taproom (and also insist that everybody who had been working that day get tested). We also felt that it made sense to be as upfront as possible about why we closed for the day, since that's the kind of thing that we would want to know if roles were reversed... 

...and then at some point we got a call from a reporter who had heard "all over social media" that we were "forced to close for the day," which was perhaps a smidge more dramatic than we would have liked (we closed voluntarily, and as far as we know we were the only ones talking about it on social media), but the article**** that they wrote didn't sensationalize the situation, so that's really neither here nor there...

...and now we're getting a bunch of weird emails from people saying things like "I heard all your employees got covid," which is pretty much the opposite of the truth and also not making this any easier for anyone. 

Well, shit. We tried. But good ol' Mother Nature had some other ideas about whether or not we should have hosted our covid-compliant socially-distanced birthday-related semi-celebrations last week, so instead it was just a regular ol' rainy Saturday. 

On a completely unrelated note, we had the pleasure of visiting our pals at Four Star Farms for the fifth year in a row last Friday! We crammed as many of the Bone Up Crew as were allowed into our caravan and trekked on out to Central Mass to frolic in the hop yards, pluck cones from the bines, and whiff up all of them fruity aromas for the afternoon. About half of the hops we use in our beers come from right here, and we got a private tour of the hop farming process from ancient dirt to cultivating hop varietals all the way to picking and harvesting (if anyone's interested, they were harvesting Casade (or dare we say... Masscade?) while we were visiting)! Thank you to Liz and the whole L'Etoile family - you never disappoint!