Hello friends! It's that time of year again when everybody's schedule gets Hella Wonky but also there's an overall uptick in free ham, so we'll go ahead and call that a wash. And since it's pretty much the end of the year (and since there ain't a hell of a lot else happenin' this week) we like to bust out a lil' "year end tradition" and navel gaze a bit about what all has gone down in the last twelve months. But we'll save that for the end (it's a bit verbose) and focus on the here and now and the holiday happenin's. And speaking of holiday schedules, here are our holiday hours!
But all that scheduling nonsense/mayhem ain't gonna stop us from tappin' up our regular Thursday cask and this week it's the re-return of tried-and-true taproom favorite Extra Naked! And since we wanted to give all you cask lovers a lil' somethin' special, we crammed that sucker fulla peachy, fruity Idaho 7!
And speaking of tasty beer, we're squeezin' one last dog beer in to 2019 and that beer is Dobbie! This here's a biscuity, toasty lil' amber named in honor of a cute lil' corgi mix whose name is entirely unrelated to any famous wizard movies that you may be thinking of and anyway it's tasty as all get-out and it's on tap by or before Sunday!
And speaking of fun and/or tasty times comin' up, we're comin' right up on our favorite locally-sourced* winter holiday: Horatio Day! You've no doubt heard us shoutin' about this for a dang ol' month now, so we'll keep it short and sweet this time (and also we're about to reminisce a bunch about how fun last year's Horatio Day was), so suffice it to say we're adding eight draft lines and tapping a whole shitload of barrel-aged beer and there's gonna be Melvin flights and cool new glassware (buy a rad glass and you get to drink out of it all day!) and good times and friendship and donuts and bacon! And yeah, we've been sporadically tapping a couple of the Horatio Day goodies over the past few weeks (we get excited), but check out this draft list!
Anyway, with all that "here and now" stuff sorted, let's get on with lookin' back!
* In the sense that nobody celebrates this holiday outside of this building. At least not that we know of.
* In the sense that nobody celebrates this holiday outside of this building. At least not that we know of.
2019: Year in Review
Whoo-dang has it been a ding-dang ol' heckin' year. It's been fulla ups and downs and strikes and gutters and highs and lows and all sortsa whathaveyou, but we're gonna grab our god-damned rose-tinted glasses and weld those fuckers to our faces because it's the god damned holidays and it's time for cheer. And we've got lots to be cheerful about, because we made some big ol' strides over the past twelve months - we've got wild beers and we're open seven days a week and we've got another sweet new hoodie design and we've got cheese and we've got a lot more trivia nights than we ever expected to have and we've gotten to do a whole handful of wedding beers and beers for bands and beers for buildings and anyway I'm rambling, so let's go over this with a finer-tooth comb, starting in...
January when we decided to straight-up ignore the bureaucratic nightmare (vis-à-vis our expansion) that was happening behind-the-scenes and kick off the year with a bit of a bang in the form of the Second Annual Horatio Day! There was barrel-aged beer and cake and merriment and a kind of silly amount of El Pulpo and mac 'n' cheese and at least one group that got so weirded out by "the bartender with the facepaint" that they just... left.
And then a little ways after that we got involved with that ridesharing promo which (for reasons we're still not clear on) involved us getting a bench* in our parking lot, and which (for reasons we are clear on, but choose to ignore) resulted in us getting piles of sass. But hey - free bench!
And anyway I digress because this was also the month that introduced us to Best! That lil' beer started out as a way for us to have fun in the brewhouse and play around with recipes a bit (it was made to kinda sorta emulate a British style that nobody around here really cares about), but it ended up having a pretty profound effect on the way we think about pale ales and, more importantly, paving the way for Jeff, so we'll call that one a win!
Then as a little added "treat" for all us brewers, we set right upon the task of pairing the entire beer menu with Girl Scout Cookies and, oh man, there's really no way to prepare for how gross you feel after you try twelve different beers with six different cookies each, but it was all worth it because we came up with a tasty-ass beer and cookie pairing menu! And that's about all for January (other than our sadly ill-fated attempt at a Jenga tournament), but we were really just gettin' that ol' ball rollin' for...
February when we were still polishin' off little drips and drabs of leftovers** from our birthday-party-for-a-cartoon-skeleton extravaganza from the previous month then we dusted off the ol' collab pants and teamed up with one of our favorite new breweries (namely Small Change) for the release of a tasty ol' farmhouse known as Bone Machine!
And speaking of pants, the fun farmhouse times didn't stop there nosiree because we also released Lazy Pants! That there was our "Valentimes" beer (or rather, more like an anti-Valentime's beer because we've never actually met anybody who likes that stupid holiday) that was supposed to demonstrate that chocolate beers can be light-colored, but really it just caused the entire bar staff to start making up beertails involving the word "pants" (Kelly's Pants, Wasted Pants, etc.) so we'll call that one a "modest success."
Anyway, while we're goin' on about Beers of the Past, February also marked the year's first Puppers Past beer: Haley! This lil' oak-aged sweet stout was made to honor the memory of a formidable-looking (but very sweet) stick chaser from Jared's halcyon days.
And then shortly after that we finally (FINALLY) - at the literal last minute - got the "go ahead" from the "powers that be" to use our expanded space (which had been 100% ready since November)! Hooray! An occasion this momentous calls for a celebration, but that had to wait until...
March when we threw our first ever (and possibly only, but definitely first) Kafka Day! Far from being a celebration of people turning into cockroaches (which was the popular opinion), this day was a celebration of the joy that can be had when working with the local government (and if you're not familiar with the term, we do suggest you look up "kafkaesque"). And so! Celebrating in the only way we knew how, we tapped up a whole buncha beers including some rare and/or barrel aged stuff (RIP Quadless Leg Monster) and also we debuted Fancy Pants! Remember Lazy Pants? From February? Well, we thought it would be fun to gussy it up a bit and blend it on up with some barrel-aged goodness and boom: Fancy Pants! And while we're on about Kafka Day Beerz, this was also the day that y'all got a first sneak peek at lil' ol' Melvin! But that was a bygone era before Melvin had all the siblings that he can boast of today and we sure are glad we had the self-restraint to keep from drinkin' it all before it even hit the barrel because dang them's some tasty tipples!
Anyway. Moving on, this was also the month that brought us Pat Signal! Made to tickle the tastebuds of our cask-lovin' friend Patrick, this beer was quite literally made to be served on cask (it's what we sent to NERAX, which is pretty much our favorite fest ever) and in true "arguably British style," it packed a light enough punch that you could get to know it over a whole session without gettin' too cross-eyed!
And while we're at it on the new-at-the-time beers train, March also brought us Out of Bounds! Named after the... ungenerous fairway sizes over at Thomson Country Club, this old-school-meets-new-school IPA was on- and off-tap in the taproom throughout the golfing season and (more to the point) it was a staple on tap at Thomson!
And steppin' ever so slightly away from beer for a moment, March was also the first time we hosted our sporadically-recurring Futurama Trivia, which allowed another new-to-us trivia host the chance to shine*** and resulted in an unnerving number of questions delivered in-character! But anyway, we best keep keepin' on, because there were plenty more peculiar events in...
April when we made a cask for an opera! (And also a cask festival, but we already talked about that one). Since this opera was put on by Original Gravity it was a bit less... traditional than we're used to, so we figured we'd get creative with our beer offering and we took a cask of Oink (our smoked wheat beer) and added a little lactose and primed it with pineapple juice and served it from a beer engine that was attached to a plastic folding table and it really doesn't sound like it would have been good but it was straight-up delicious (one of the OG guys summed it up nicely, saying "I should hate everything about this, but it's actually really good")!
And anyway a little while after that there was Jeff. Jeff. Jeff was followed pretty quickly by Dance Bob (which - unlike Jeff - had an actual, albeit stupid, story behind the name) and then we hosted a Junk Food Showdown between Bonetown and Brato (as it happens, this was our last food showdown before Brato got all "boo-hoo we can't organize complicated food competitions for you because we have a restaurant to run") and also at some point we got a dog but you don't see or hear much from/about her because she's finicky about modeling for pictures (just like Jared!) and even more finicky about meeting lots of people (just like Jared!) but that sounds like something we can figure out in...
May when we absolutely did not figure that out, but we did get Pride tanks! We missed the boat a bit on this last year (one of our bartenders asked us if we'd be doing Pride merch, but he didn't think of it until, like, three days before Pride which isn't really enough time), so we jumped right on it this year and we even broke our (Jared's) longstanding "no man tanks" rule and we're glad we did because they're snazzy as hell! We also brewed a Pride beer and brewed (but didn't release, for barrel-aging reasons) our 300th batch (the brewday for which fell right around the three-year anniversary of our first batch) and brought back a couple Old Favorites (namely Joybringer and Loretta and Lawn Chair)...
...and we released Chaos Reigns, a collab beer we made with Vaulted (a local metal band, who also made some rad-ass shirts to go with the beer) and also for the first time ever we started keeping the taproom open seven dang days a week! And we sure needed those extra open days to handle all the excitement in...
June when we started the month with our first-ever photo exhibit, featuring concert photography from three photographers and aptly titled Images from the Pit! We also released our next dog beer (Elmo) and we released a beer that we made for a beer dinner at The Oceanaire and then we attended said beer dinner and we expanded our trivia repertoire with some horror movie trivia and also a different trivia night with another new-to-us host who likes to bounce around a bit on themes (the first one was, fittingly, "alcohol") and we somehow managed to put out like three new beers every week and also there was cheese!
As you may have noticed, we love snacks and snacking around here, and there's really no better snack than cheese so we spent a while pining over a cheese program until we realized that we can just, like, do things and thus the cheese program was born! We started with cheese flights, focused on a different creamery every month and with a beer flight to pair, and now we're just straight-up mongerin' cheese all the time! Anyway, there will be plenty more cheese to be had in...
July when we didn't get up to a whole hell of a lot because it was seven billion degrees all the damn time, but we did finally achieve a big ol' goal of ours (one we never ever thought we'd reach in only three short years) and that's our first-ever wild beer releases, which we collectively know as Critters! We started out strong with a triple bottle release (the draft versions were released sequentially, for logistical reasons) with the full intention of releasing more ASAP and then we realized that wild beers take months and months to make so we're really just catching back up on that now but whatever, we got Critters! And there's sure to be a couple more wild surprises up our sleeves because we're just about at our favorite month of the year, which is...
August when pretty much the whole month was devoted to preparing for our birthday party and shouting about our birthday party and then eventually throwing our birthday party and then getting all misty-eyed about how much fun we had at our birthday party. But! It was! So! Much! Fun!
There were hella new beers and hot dogs and bands and hot sauce and an ill-advised pinata and caveman steaks and some old favorites back on tap for the day and apparently some hatchets and macarons and one-of-a-kind swag and dang but it just fills us with joy to be able to do all this cool stuff and it's just downright heartwarming to be able to share it with so many cool people!
Anyway, we straight-up continued riding that feeling well into...
September when we were still constantly grinning from ear to ear about all the fun we had at our birthday party, and then we did a bunch of collab beers (most of them with Saltbox, for some reason) and we had our first taste of the fine foods from taproom frequent-flyer Boston HotChix and we had our first Retro Video Game Night and we served/ate an impressive number of hot dogs and there was some sort of festival right outside our front door! And at the tail end of all that, we got to be a part of the Smuttynose 25th Anniversary brewday which was a pretty big honor because those guys have been making tasty beer since pretty much forever.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure another dog was acquired at some point, which was just in time for some dog-related happenings in...
October, the most spooktacular of months, when the whole production staff (and anybody else foolish enough to join) excitedly embarked on the task of writing our beer and candy pairing menu for Halloween and then we got to spend the rest of the evening with tummyaches so bad that we started questioning all of our life choices. But that ain't get our spooktacular spirits down!
We also did pumpkin carving on the patio and we swapped out that ol' photo exhibit for a seasonally-appropriate art exhibit (Monday Mosh Monsters! They're so cool!) and we hosted an immersive theater event that definitely didn't blow up any of our light fixtures by accident.
And. AND. We had the spooktacularly great idea to bring all our furry friends in on this spooktacular fun and we had a dog costume contest at the end of the month! There were treats galore and tons of good pups struttin' their stuff all over our parking lot and people dressed up with their dogs and there were dogs dressed as friggin' Critters bottles and anyway it was pretty much the cutest thing we've ever done and now we have to do it every year until the end of time.
And, in uncharacteristic appropriateness, we also had another dog beer on tap in October! This time around it was brown ale made for a beer-stealin' little bulldog named Rufus! Anyway, that about wraps up all the spooktacular fun that we were able to cram in to ol' October, so we gotta slog our way through...
November when we released So. Many. Bottles.
And since we were already puttin' out a shitload of bottles, we figured we'd just throw in another made-up holiday and see what happened, and what happened was we had a lot of fun! The holiday in question was Pulpo Day and it was/is (unsurprisingly) a celebration of our delectable chocolate orange imperial stout, and it was a tasty day indeed! We set up the ol' fest rig and tapped up vintage Pulpo and barrel-aged Pulpo and vintage barrel-aged Pulpo and also there was bacon! There were also eventually El Pulpo shirts but those weren't here in time for the holiday (oh well).
Then a little while after that we busted out bottles of Joyrider to go along with our sweet-ass flannels and then right after that there was another kinda-sorta made-up holiday and that's Shitty Wednesday!
Long story short, we try to "soften the blow" of being out and about on the day before Thanksgiving, and nothing softens that blow quite like releasing a shitload of bottles! This time around we released Melvin and Melvin and Melvin and Melvin and we wrote up a whole list of Thanksgiving Beer Pairings to go with all that Melvin (and also everything else on the menu) and that late-ass Turkey Day meant we didn't even realize the month was over until...
December... which is this month so there's not a hell of a lot of "looking back" to do because it's hard to reminisce about the present (unless you really like weed, but that's neither here nor there) but anyway we did manage to hit the moderately-ridiculous milestone of releasing both our 300th batch (Fig Pig, which we originally brewed back in May) and our 350th batch (Life Sentence Part Deux) more-or-less simultaneously, so that's... something?
Anyway, we also introduced dog bandanas (and got our camera-shy canine to do a spot of modeling) and we also wrote this very long blog post! Whew!
And at the end of this ridiculous year, looking back over all the twists and turns and good times and less-good times, it's easy to see that the ups really do outweigh the downs and the strikes stand out far more than the gutters,**** which is why we like to take a minute***** to reflect and put everything in perspective. We love our weird little brewery and we love coming up with new ways to try and make your day a little brighter. We've gotten to meet a ton of great people - on both sides of the bar - and we can't possibly thank you enough for making us a part of your life, because y'all are what keeps this train rollin'.
So, once more, thank you. Thank you for coming to our made-up holidays and thank you for getting excited about cheese with us and thank you for tolerating it when our dishwasher broke (and when our floor broke, and when our cold room broke) and thank you for dressing up your dogs to come hang out in our parking lot and thank you for getting stoked about all our new beers and thank you for being you. You're a rad person and we're glad to know you. Cheers!
* That bench, which can apparently be converted into a picnic table, is now a kind of poignant/depressing time capsule of the breweries that existed at the time of its making.
** And, somehow, nursing several different headaches at once.
*** Be weird, but with a microphone this time
**** That being said this year will still be remembered as The Year When Everything Broke, but that's a different story for a different time.
***** We're using a pretty liberal definition of "minute" here, since this took a somewhat-embarrassing amount of time to write.
** And, somehow, nursing several different headaches at once.
*** Be weird, but with a microphone this time
**** That being said this year will still be remembered as The Year When Everything Broke, but that's a different story for a different time.
***** We're using a pretty liberal definition of "minute" here, since this took a somewhat-embarrassing amount of time to write.
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