Anyway, in honor of this fine gentleman's service to the local brewing community (not to mention to veterans), we whipped up a smoky black ale using some locally-grown peachwood-smoked malt and also just a whisper of maple syrup and soon you'll get to have some! (Disclaimer: Dave did not sweat into this beer at any point during the brewing process. What he does once he's got his own cans of this beer is his business though).
2020: Year in Review
And on that note, we are gonna try and avoid going on about pandemic this and societal upheaval that (at least to the best of our ability), since this post is really intended to be about navel-gazing, but also there were a few... externalities that set the tone for the year (and, for once, we're not just referring to the building department throwing a fit and threatening to shut us down unless we abide by their vague-yet-apparently-critically-important demands.* There was also some of that, but we'll get to that in due time), so it's bound to come up.
But despite all the weird/terrible things that happened this year, there were also a lot of cool things we managed to accomplish! We started canning (using a mobile canner) and then we pretty quickly graduated to having our own canning line and we vastly expanded our outdoor space and we implemented yet another of Grace's semi-drunken ideas and this time we all got matching-ish tattoos of El Pulpo (the first time we ended up implementing one of her spirited suggestions we ended up starting a kickball league) and we started home delivery and vastly expanded the number of stores that carry our beer (from one to "more than one") and we put out a CD and anyway the point is that quite a bit has happened this year.
And even with all of that, I haven't even gotten to the fact that this year we've made more beer than we ever have in one year and we got to brew a buncha cool collab beers and we vastly expanded our wild beer program and we increased our bottle menu to the point that we currently have more beers available than we ever have at one time (even if you count parties/fests, which essentially means that every day can - and should - be Horatio Day) and I guess our point is that beer might seem like it plays second fiddle a little bit when we're looking back on the year, but I assure you that it always plays first fiddle in our hearts.
But! We're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll get to all that in a bit, but first we gotta look back at this year that started off oh-so-innocently in...
All of us.
** It's worth mentioning that, while we do from time to time exaggerate details for the sake of a good story, this is not one of those times.
*** We'll leave it up to you to decide what balance of "moderately tearful" and "extremely drunk" goes into such a thing.
**** I'm actually not sure if we landed on a name to give the canning line, which is weird because we're pretty big fans of giving people names to our equipment. So for the sake of argument, we'll call her Phyllis.
But seriously, he dragged three pinball machines and set 'em up in our doorways so we could have us the best dang "socially distanced" pinball party that we could wrangle (well, it was socially distanced if you didn't notice when Sir-Hugs-A-Lot forgot about our "no hugging" rule that we had to institute because of him specifically)! Then we followed that right up with our first virtual event since... May? Probably?
***** Planned start date of floor repairs: November 2018.