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A Blog About Beer!

1/16/2019

Howdy, friends! It's lookin' like we're settlin' into the right chilly part of this winter, so we gathered up all the good tastes and good times we could to make it worth your while to brave the cold on this here long weekend!

And speaking of it being a long weekend, we'll be open from 12-6 on Monday, January 21st for all your still-putting-off-the-laundry-even-though-you've-had-four-days drinkin' needs!

Speaking of drinkin' (though aren't we always?), remember last week when we talked a lil' bit about our newest Super IPA: Cryptic Nonsense? Well it's on tap now and it's tasty as all heck, so come on out and see for yourself!

And while we're on about new beers, we've got a couple new beers waitin' in the wings, just itchin' for something* to kick so's they can go on tap, and the first of those is Best! In short, Best is an easygoing, locally-sourced, fruity/earthy, straight-up tasty lil' pale ale and we do predict you gon' enjoy!

In addition to that beguiling little Pale, we're also anxiously awaiting the day that we get to tap Stone Valley! It's been far too long since we've had some delicious amber, so we gathered up a buncha good stuff from some of our friends (Stone Path, Valley Malt, and of course Four Star Farms) and made a delicious amber!

But gettin' back to things that you can drink in the more-or-less immediate future, we're tappin' our weekly cask this Thursday and it's an old favorite poppin' back in with a twist: Shut Up Kelly! with oak chips that've been soakin' in Queequeg Spiced Rum! It's mighty good, I tells ya what.

Speaking of good things, we've got Matilda's back on Friday! You already know the deal with these fine folks: hella tasty food made by good people. What more could you ask for?

Then on Saturday we've got 3 Kitchens Catering comin' in and doing wing flights! Wing! Flights! Wing! Flights! Wing! Flights! Anyway in case you haven't guessed, we're pretty stoked about wing flights.

Also on Saturday, if you're the travellin' type (or if you live a bit farther away, whichever), our beer is gonna be featured in the Saltbox Kitchen Brewed for a Cause dinner! This event is hosted in conjunction with the Black Ale Project, which means a chunk of the proceeds go to charity; so you'll get good eats for a good cause, which sounds like a win-win in our book!

Lastly but far from leastly, we've got Mr. Tamole back in the house this Sunday! He's been through the taproom more than a few times, but there's a damn good reason we keep bringin' him back in, so come on out and eat some tasty food with us!

*Hint: Marimba, FAO

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In Which We Get Cryptic

1/8/2019

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Well hey there! Even though the second best day of the year has already come and gone, we're jumpin' right back into the ol' groove with a fun-filled weekend packed to the brim with good times and good tastes galore!

Pictured: a real buncha winners

But before we get to movin' forward, we gots to look back at least a little bit because Horatio Day was just completely rad as hell and we wanna thank all of you for coming out and celebrating our silly made-up holiday with us. Y'all are some cool people and we've gotten to do some damn cool stuff because of it, even if we did manage to scare off a few people because of "that bartender with the facepaint."

He only wanted to help you

You beautiful people!

But amongst all that jubilation, Horatio Day is a tad bittersweet as we bid our final goodbyes to special beers we've known and loved (like 2016 El Pulpo, Serendipity, and Shelby), and we bid a somewhat more temporary goodbye to some old favorites that we'll get to see again next year (barreled El Pulpo, Buffalo Nickel, maybe Quadless Leg Monster, 2017 El Pulpo). But! We've also got some outright Good News - we've still got smallish amounts of a few special beers (Horatio Day leftovers, as it were), and we'll be tappin' those over the next couple weeks. First up, we've still got some Ginger Extraordinaire left on tap (though it's been going quickly), and we've also got some Protector for your drinking pleasure! After those kick, they'll be replaced more or less at random by a couple others (Buffalo Nickel, 2017 El Pulpo, Barreled El Pulpo, Melvin, and Joyrider, to be specific) and we'll be shoutin' about that on the social medias when it happens, so if there's something you've got a hankerin' for we suggest you keep them eyes peeled!

And if you've got a need to be *extra* fancy in the new year, we've got about forty Horatio Day goblets left! So come grab one!

And speaking of beers that are nearly gone, our beloved Doyle is about to slip this mortal coil, never to be seen again. But! We planned for this! We've got a new Super IPA contender, who goes by the name of Cryptic Nonsense, ready to take its place! So if you're gonna miss Doyle, come get some while the gettin's good! And if you wanna try this newcomer, come help us drink the rest of the Doyle so you can get Cryptic!

Tastes like delicious mysteries. And fruit.

Anyway, getting back to beers that are with us for the Long Haul, we've got Shut Up Kelly! on cask starting this Thursday! That there is a beer that's pretty much made for cask so we made a cask of it!

Yep.

And if you're looking for something to entertain your brain while you sip them suds, Thursday also marks the next installment of Simpsons Trivia!

Ah yes, the monthly competition for terrible prizes we found on the Internet!

In further news of good tastes, our Friday popup is a newcomer around these parts: Bird's Nest! Their specialty seems to be combining classic Italian foods with other foods and then deep frying the whole damn thing (their biggest claim to fame is deep fried manicotti), so needless to say we're stoked as heck to see what they got!

Then on Saturday we've got our pals from Smoke Shop BBQ in here with delicious meats! Their meats are very tasty and you should eat them.

And then to cap off all the rad stuff that's goin' on this weekend, on Sunday there's gonna be Girl Scout Cookies! No, it ain't yet time for our annual(ish) beer and cookie pairing extravaganza - we ain't got the cookies yet - but we are gonna have a Girl Scout in here slingin' sweets for the afternoon, so if you wanna get paws on some Samoas (or some of the other, lesser cookies) come on by!

Also on Saturday, though not at all related to our brewery but we feel like you need to know about it, apparently the City of Everett is gonna set a shitton of Christmas trees on fire. That is all.

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2018 by the Numbers! Also, Horatio Day!

1/1/2019

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Well hello there. We've been expecting you. We've got a right proper follow-up to last week's inward-focused navel-gazing marathon, but first we gotta tell you about all the rad stuff we got goin' on this week, and oh man are we ever prepared to get all kindsa festive all up in!

First up, on Thursday, is 2019's first installment of Audio Triviality! We don't know the theme just yet, so we'll assume it's something like "still kind of ashamed I tried to drink a bathtub full of mojitos on new year's" or something like that. (Editor's note: it's Sex, Drugs, & Rock 'n Roll, but sure, let's go with mojito shame. Close enough.)

And to go with all the Triviality, we're tappin' what is one of our personal favorite beers on cask: Extra Naked! And to "kick things up a notch," we tossed in a fistful o' citrusy, cedary Chaos! That's definitely a coincidence and not some kind of commentary on how we think the new year is going to go.

Probably!

Then on Friday we've got our friends from Matilda's in the house slingin' fried treats! There ain't much else to say here because we've had their empanadas a whole buncha times and they are always On Point.

A Horatio Eve feast!

And then. On Saturday. It's the Big Day. The day we've been excitedly planning for over the past few months: Horatio Day! It's our second-favorite day of the year and we are just straight-up stoked as heck that it's almost here!

Three more sleeps until Horatio Day!

Y'all have already heard us talk about this day for six weeks, but we'll put up some Q 'n' A style info here just in case:

What's the deal with Horatio Day?
Horatio's our dapper logo dude, and we're throwing him a birthday party! In short this means we'll be tapping a bunch of cool beers - rare stuff, barrel-aged stuff (lots of barrel-aged stuff, as it were), stuff we've been hangin' on to in our cellars, and maybe a couple new things!

How many beers will be on tap?
If everything goes to plan, we'll have twenty three beers on tap! There's our standard draft list (which is twelve beers, and we got kind of excited and put a couple Horatio Day beers on there already. Hello, Ginger Extraordinaire!), plus the cask, plus ten more lines full of cool stuff!

Did you catch the casual bottle release of Buffalo Nickel, our amber rum barrel aged super saison?
Yes? Great!

Any other fun stuff?
Of course! Who do you think you're talking to? We've got fancy gold-rimmed glasses again this year if you wanna drink in style all day (we did order more this time around, but we still expect them to go pretty quickly), or if you've got a Year Two anniversary mug you can bring that and we'll fill that for you, and there's gonna be cake (there's always cake), and there's a Horatio costume contest!

Wait, there's a costume contest?
Hell yeah! What better way to celebrate somebody's birthday than dressing up like them? Anyway, you know how costume contests work - come dressed as Horatio and tag us on the Instagrams (use the hashtag #horatioday2019) and we'll give prizes to the winners!

You gonna have food at this shindig?
Of course! The Bacon Truck is gonna set up in the taproom from noon 'til six, then we're having a Mac 'n' Cheese competition between Brato and Bonetown starting at six! So if you wanna get fed, you gon' get fed.

Will the new side of the taproom be open?
Sadly, no. That's a whole long story that we'll get into some other time, but suffice to say it's still being considered an "active worksite" which means we ain't allowed to use it even though it's pretty much all set up and ready to go.

What's the story with the fancy glassware?
We've got fancy glassware! That's, um, kinda it, really. Basically we got cool gold-rimmed glasses, and if you want to you can buy one and drink out of a fancy gold-rimmed glass all day (or you can buy one and take it home with you, whatever you like). We ran out of these pretty quickly last year, so we got twice as many this time around, which either means we'll still run out before 2 PM, or we'll have them on hand until July. Time will tell!

Seriously though, aren't they awesome?!

Anyway. That's pretty much all the hips and haps for that big ol' day fulla fun! And, just in case you can't get out and celebrate on Saturday, there's a likely chance a few of these releases will be lingering on tap Sunday afternoon, and we'll have Mr. Tamole dishin' out hot tamales to help nurse our hangovers.

A post-Horatio Day feast!

Oh! We've got one more fun thing to talk about before we get all retrospective on you, and that's December's coloring contest winners!

Our winner, @lew989, and our runners up below!

Whew. Okay. Now, we've got a little tradition around here that we started up two years ago, and basically we look back at the year and see how many silly stats we can come up with. It's a ton of fun to write, and everything is as well-researched and accurate as we can get it (much thanks to Liz L'Etoile and the crew at Four Star Farms for answering our weird questions about hops), and anyway we hope you enjoy reading this silly nonsense as much as we enjoy writing it! Now, on with...

2018 by the Numbers

Number of batches brewed: 105
Number of double batches: 13
Amount of beer packaged, in gallons: 11,246
Number of flights that would fill: 71,972
Percentage of total volume actually served in flights: 12%
Number of different beers released: 60 (49 if you don't count flagships or other re-releases)
Number of collaboration beers: 26
Highest number of new beers released in one month: 6 (tie between June and November)

Beer brewed most often: Key Lime
Number of Key Lime batches made: 14 (three of which were double batches)
Number of key lime pies that could have been made with that lime juice instead: 544
Number of actual key limes it would take to produce that much juice: 10,445

Amount of hibiscus, in pounds, that was sacrificed to Loretta this year: 50

Number of times Joybringer was brewed: 4
Percentage of Joybringer that was produced exclusively for fun barrel projects: 42%
Number of times Jared thought he was super clever by singing "Ode to Joybringer" on these brewdays: like six

Number of funky beers aging at the beginning of the year: 0
Number of funky beers aging currently: 9 (or rather, 9 variations from a stock of 4 base beers)
Amount we previously expected that we'd be doing cool shit like this after just two short years: 0%

Amount of hops used, in pounds: 511.3

Percentage of hops that came from local suppliers: 43%
Percentage of hops that came from Michigan, of all places: 10%
Most used hop variety: Cascade (though it's Galena if you consider Masscade to be separate from Cascade)
Height, in feet, that you would need to grow all those hops on a single bine: 3,837.75
Amount of time, in weeks (assuming a 40-hour workweek), it would take you to pick all those hops by hand: about 13, if you don't take lunch breaks

Amount of grain used, in pounds: 27,274
Percentage of grain that came from local suppliers: 19%
Amount of oats used, as measured in bowls of oatmeal: 12,475
Amount of brown sugar used, also measured in bowls of oatmeal (but as a topping this time): 12,327

Yeast used, in cells (approximate): 593,746,840,000,000

Average OG of beer produced (in degrees SG): 54
Average ABV of beer produced: 5.79%
Highest ABV beer produced: Rebello Fellow (9.5%)
Lowest ABV beer produced: The Showdown (3.7%)
Amount of vodka, in gallons, it would take to make the same amount of alcohol we produced this year: 1,628

Number of Big Stupid Cans filled (approximate): 3,150
Number of bottles filled: 972
Number of times Tom managed to get beer all over the ceiling while filling bottles: 3 (goddammit Tom)

Number of places we were on draft at the beginning of the year: 7
Number of places we're on draft now (thanks Amanda!): 28

Number of times the mill completely broke: 1
Number of times Jared burned off all his arm hair lighting the burner under the HLT: only 6 this year!
Number of times Jared dropped his wedding ring into the mash tun while it was full: come on, man. Be cool. You said you weren't gonna tell anyone.

Number of major-ish injuries sustained during brewing: 1
Number of major-ish injuries sustained during kickball: 6

Number of kickball games: 20 or so
Number of different breweries (and/or distilleries and/or cideries) that showed up to kickball games: 17
Number of kickballs popped by John's dog Larry: at least one, maybe two
Amount of skin, in square inches, lost to friction burns while sliding in to base: 15

Number of words written in the blog: 41,981

Least verbose month: September (2243 words)

Most verbose month: December (6512 words, about half of which were last week)
Top 3 most commonly used words in December (in order): beer, time, year
Number of times we used the word "beer" in the blog this year: 480 (376 if you don't count variations like "beers")
Number of times we manged to use the word "spooktacular" in the blog this year: 14

Number of casks filled: 61

Number of cask festivals attended: 4!

Number of beer festivals attended/poured at (including cask festivals): 29

New beers released in 2018:

January: Quadless Leg Monster, Cello, Loretta, Shelby
February: Stag, Big deLICious, Nug
March: L.I.Z., Galena, Stomper, Big Boots 2018

April: Pink Smoothie, Ghost Dragon, J.A.R.E.D., Springtime Lies
May: Lawnchair, Comet Bomb, Serendipity, Ginger Jamboree
June: Joyrider, Four Star Smoothie, Bison Penny (Batch 200!), Azacca, Mr. Buttons, Hillcrest

July: Doomrider, Rebello Fellow, Chromo
August: DNA, Sunken Wit, Blood Built, Lil' Delicious, Jaunty
September: The Windy Man, Death Salon, The Showdown, Nerd Farm

October: Orange Red Dead, Korey, Adelle, Danzig
November: Hartshorne, Nick, Biere de Krampus, Marimba, Barreled El Pulpo, Barreled Shelby
December: Doyle, The Protector, Ginger Extraordinaire

Rereleases (not mentioned above): FAO, Oh My!, Joybringer, EPICS, Ruby Rye, Bullhead, Black Witow, Extra Naked, Key Lime, Wasted Life, Shut Up Kelly!

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In Which We Achieved Things

12/26/2018

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Howdy friends! We got a whole buncha nonsense and navel-gazin' for y'all this week, but first we wanted to fill you in on the hips and haps around these parts!

Startin' off on Thursday, our weekly cask is FAO Black Ale! We just tapped the draft version of this sucker the other day and whoo-ee is it tasty! It's nice 'n' smooth and it's a whole helluva lot lighter than you might expect given the color (it's our take on a schwarzbier, but - in another, truer sense - it isn't really a schwarzbier). And what's more, we brewed this beer in collaboration with The Black Ale Project (and Black Ale Dave himself even came out for the brewday this time!), which means a portion of the proceeds go to a veteran-related charity! Good times and good causes!

Speaking of delicious beers that we have on tap, Doomrider is back! We were gonna wait until Horatio Day, but we got excited and now it's here! Come drink some!

Beers!

Movin' on down further into the weekend, this Saturday we've got Spoko Pierogi back in the house! It's been a minute since they've graced our taprooms with their delicious dumplings, and dang are we stoked to have them back in the house!

We're told we'll have pierogi burstin' with the following: blueberry and black currant, roasted cabbage and mushroom, and Ruskie (potato, cheese and onion), plus beef goulash!

Also of note, we will be open from 12-6 on New Year's Day (next Tuesday) and we'll have donuts from Union Square for all your post-party snackin' needs. BUT we will be keeping normal hours on New Year's Eve (Monday) and not be open because it's a bullshit holiday.

Anyway, with all that outta the way, let's get on with some Year End Endless Rambling!

Dang on a thang, folks, it is That Time of Year again - time for us to look back on the year and wax nostalgic on how far we've come and all that shit. And as much as you might be tired of looking back on this weirdass year, we do think it's important to reflect on where we've been and how far we've come over the course of the last twelve months (and also it helps us hide the fact that pretty much nothing newsworthy happens at this time of year anyway).

Anyway, next week we'll be draggin' out our much-anticipated* Year By the Numbers, but for now we'll be takin' a totally-not-self-indulgent journey through the past twelve months to see where we've been and maybe try to use that to see where we're headed (we don't know either). So let's all take a trip in time back to the first hot dog extravaganza or whatever!

Just kidding. We'll start with cake!

January!

We started up one of our favorite-ever traditions: Horatio Day! We all got to don our fanciest crowns and hang out and hide from the blistering cold and get nice and roasty toasty with/on a buncha cool barreled and/or cellared beer (from gold-rimmed glasses, no less!) and maybe some cake and dang but a good time was had by all!

Celebrating everyone's favorite craft beer skeleton

But the fun times didn't stop at that there party nosiree, because January was just straight-up loaded with good times spent with Beer Friends - we brewed Lil' deLICious with the fine folks from Big aLICe and we tapped Shelby (the second of our Puppers Past beers, and the first with its own sweet glassware), and we made Cello for an event that our friends at Original Gravity put on (where all in attendance got to see Jared be bad at public speaking) and at some point this happened and oh yeah we also started sellin' delicious empanadas made by our friends at Buenas and that's not even really beer news anymore but they are/were tasty! Whew! That was a surprisingly packed month, which meant we needed a bit of a breather in...

February!

... which (though we didn't know it yet) ended up being the calm before the storm with only two new things involving beer friends - namely, the tappening of Stag which we made to suit the refined tastes of the good folks up at Gulu Gulu, plus this month was the first time we ever got to work with Brato and that's pretty cool because those guys are rad! And also this month brought us the first in what we hoped would be a long-running series of beers: L.I.Z!

We'd planned on doing a bunch of Acronym Beers where we used hop varieties to spell out names but, hey, spoiler alert: we made two and then kinda forgot about it.

Oh, and also a new wall showed up in our building, but that's really more relevant to us in...

March!

... when we signed a lease on our new/added space! We started expanding!

Pictured: the birth of Problem Child Number Two

Of course, that meant a bunch of cleaning and painting and flooring and furniture building and swearing and dealing with contractors and waiting for contractors and wondering why the contractors stopped two thirds of the way through the work they promised to do and in the interest of keeping this positive I'm gonna stop talking about contractors and all the associated baloney that comes with them. Anyway, it gave us something to do (and worry about!) which is good because we clearly didn't have a whole lot else going on.

Except for drinking cask beer out of hollowed-out tropical fruit, of course.

Anyway, with stars (and dust) in our eyes and a spring in our step, we marched onward into...

April!

... which was pretty much the Month of the Collaborations (or so we thought), with the release of two Pink Boots beers - Big Boots 2018 and Pink Smoothie - one of which ended up being unintentionally hilarious because Bro Dudes™ refused to order it by name.**

"I'll have the... P.S. You know... the double..."

And while we were collabin' up some collabs, we also brought in our friends from Hop Head Farms and brewed up some delicious-ass Ghost Dragon! And at some point during this month full of painting and beer and furniture making and cookies and floor installation and casks (more specifically, our third favorite*** holiday ever: NERAX!) and expectantly waiting for tanks whose promised delivery date was "before February," we realized that with all this extra beer we'd be able to make, we should probably make More Than Zero effort to be on tap out in the real world so we hired our first-ever real-ass salesperson!

Amanda!

We didn't shout about it much at the time (we figured "first person working in sales at this brewery" was enough pressure), but Amanda's been attending tastings and fests and tracking down bar managers and lugging kegs all over hell and creation like a champ, so we figured we gotta give credit where credit's due! Anyway, oh man that's a lotta stuff, maybe we'll get some rest in...

May!

... when hahaha nope we got the opposite of rest!

Who needs rest anyway? We gots empty tanks that need to to be filled!

We got things kickin' off right by receiving our new double-sized tanks and then - the very next day, as luck would have it - heading down to GrandTen to turn one of our beer recipes (yeast and all) into a whiskey!

That particular tipple ain't out yet, but we hear that our yeast had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends at Whiskey Camp and we are just excited as heck to taste the results in like a year. Plus! We had some beer friends over at our digs - specifically Liz L'Etoile from Four Star Farms - and brewed up some good old-fashioned Friendship Beer! The beer in question was Four Star Smoothie and also I think that was the last time we used the "smoothie" naming convention because people kept thinking it would be one of those "milkshake" beers that's mostly made out of lies and garbage.

Anyway, we also started up (and/or continued, depending on how you look at it) yet another new tradition around here with the Bestowing of the Paddle on our brewer Ben who's been working here for a right long time.

Ben was pleased.

Anyway, that's about it for May and it seems like we probably won't be starting any new traditions in...

June!

... when we started up what is hopefully another new tradition: Brewery Kickball! The whole idea started as part of a (possibly alcohol-fueled) tirade from our bartender-turned-lab-assistant Grace but then the whole thing gained momentum and we played a buncha games over the course of the summer (and it was only open to people who work for breweries, which is why we didn't shout about it more) and it ended up being a tonna fun, with people from seventeen or so different breweries showing up (one of whom invited us to attend a moderately ridiculous heavy metal beer fest in the fall)!

Just... the silliest people

And if that weren't enough new traditions for you (and also assuming you have a pretty loose definition of "tradition") we also started up Simpsons Trivia! A number of know-it-all-Neddies were delighted to flex their knowledge of quotes and minutiae from everybody's formerly-favorite TV show, and they were even more delighted to find out that the prizes were just, like, the absolute worst knockoff merch that we could dig up on the internet. And to add to this already-massive pile of fun times with friends, Liz and Jared somehow got invited to judge an air guitar championship and also we brewed our 200th dang batch! Party! And. AND. Since we apparently couldn't go more than a few days without brewing a collab beer with some beer friends this year, we made a collab beer with some beer friends! This time around, Andrea Stanley - the maltstress behind Valley Malt - came by to brew Mister Buttons, a malty amber made to honor the memory of Andrea's dearly departed doggo! And at that point we were just rollin' full steam, which is good because we needed all the momentum we could get for...

Remember those sweet-ass tumblers? I bet Mr. Buttons would have loved them.

July!

... when we started out by (unwittingly) doing something that we (now) know is pretty much guaranteed to irritate people: giving away free stuff! In this case it was hot dogs and we're pretty much not ever gonna do that again because it generated a Grumpiness Whirlwind the likes of which is seldom seen outside of the line at the post office in mid-December.

Especially because those people in line aren't even waiting for hot dogs.

(picture chosen because of Ben's face in the background)

Anyway that's neither here nor there because the rest of July was pretty frickin' rad because we had our friends from GrandTen Distilling over to brew at our house (though that beer's still slumberin' away in some barrels) and we had our first-ever Inferno Night with Brato and Liz once again ended up in an arm wrestling competition where she got suckered into competing using her non-dominant hand and we made a beer about a house and also there was hella progress on the buildout front in terms of tiles and a new cold room and the arrival of our new bar and also a staircase to nowhere that confused the heck out of people for a good long while (up to and including now).

The Fermento-Terror will rise again (ideally in a lefty-friendly wrestling competition)

And with all this buildout and brewing and fest season in full swing and also all that other stuff we do on a daily basis, we were running ourselves a bit ragged on the production side of things so we brought on Regular Tom!

Pictured: Regular (??) Tom

And you might (but probably won't find out how he earned that nickname (his real name is Darryl) in...

August!

... when all our attentions and energies were focused on gettin' things up for the Big Birthday Bash that we spend most of our summers yammering about because it's pretty much our favorite day of the year.

So of course we spend it with our favorite group of weirdos.

And oh man did we do everything we damn could to overdo it on this day. Last year we had a band? This year we have four. Last year we made a special beer for the band that was playing? This year we made a beer for every. damn. band. plus one for Victor (well, that was for a different event, but it was still on tap at the party) plus one for our pinball guy's daughter just for the hell of it.

She'll probably think that's cool? Someday?

Plus we had cookies and barbecue and there was a dang hot sauce made special just for that day and somebody (hi Amy!) made a Horatio plushie and holy hell it was pretty much the best.

Liz could not keep it together after that

But August was also a bittersweet month, because it marked the last day of our (now former) bartender Bubs, whose departure (from the job. Not, like, from this mortal coil) was celebrated by Grace (remember Grace? From several paragraphs ago?) with what might be the best parting gift we've seen in a long dang time.

All Grace said was, "I told them it was for a boy and it should say 'good luck'..."

And anyway, all that activity and excitement and nonsense was just Act One of The Chaotic End To Our Summer, as you'll see in...

September!

... when we brewed up yet another buncha collabs because why not and the first one wasn't really a collab because all we did was "buy ingredients and then use them" which honestly describes the process behind every beer ever. Anyway that was our annual wet hop beer, which this year was The Windy Man (though some folks took to stubbornly pronouncing it as "windy"), but the collabs didn't stop there, no way!

Wet hop season: the one time of year where the idyllic image of brewing actually matches up with our day to day responsibilities

We brewed Death Salon for the Death Salon and we brewed Showdown for, um, The Showdown and just in case you think we're getting uncreative with our beer names we also brewed Nerd Farm for Catalyst! Oh and also there was some sort of street festival that involved/showcased a reportedly-confusing and/or disappointing performance from some sort of contemporary rock musician. Anyway that bit was really just a weird blip in a weird whirlwind of a month because we're already up to...

October!

... when we actually held The Showdown!

We handed out a skull with a crown on it and everything. Very official.

And then, we got to do the kind of thing that we never even really dreamed about when opening a brewery, which was to brew a beer for/in collaboration with one of our favorite bands (Black Tusk) and then haul our asses all the way to Pittsburgh to serve said beer at an all-day heavy metal and beer fest and then on the way back we finally made it out to Big aLICe (original estimated date: "definitely by early spring" and then our expansion happened) and brewed a beer with those rad dudes (we're told it's gonna be called Big Bones and honestly I can't believe we've never thought to use that name before)!

2018: the year of adding things to bucket lists just to cross them off immediately

And then, instead of passing out in a pile on the floor we ate just way too much candy in order to come up with a festive pairing menu for our Halloween party (which, incidentally, had some pretty rad costumes on display) and then on top of all that we finally got to meet our new coworker Handsome Tom!**** But that's somehow already all in the past, so we gotta get to know good ol' Handsome Tom in...

November!

... when we made a beer about a house again, but it was a different house this time, because "beer for houses" is apparently the niche we fill now? Anyway, the beer in question was Hartshorne which we brewed for Bubs's house (remember Bubs? The one with the weird cake? Though now that I think about it, that doesn't narrow things down all that much around here) and to go with it we went to a fundraising event for the Wakefield Historical Society (and/or for this house specifically) where we got to awkwardly stammer about beer to a bunch of strangers!

Anyway, this month also brought us the opportunity to do one of our favorite things: brew wedding beers! Friends of the brewery Adelle and Korey got hitched in November and they had us make His 'n' Hers beers for their wedding that are made to be blended at serving in a beertail! And since we're brewing beers for houses and people, we gotta brew a beer for a dog (it had been, like, almost two months since we'd brewed a dog beer) so this time around we focused on Liz's childhood dog Nick and made a sweet-potato-infused golden ale that just so happened to be ready just in time for the most sweet-potato-filled holiday of all: Shitty Wednesday! And since we had a more-or-less seasonally-appropriate beer, we figured we'd just make it a whole thing and introduce you to our sweet new can art and also release a buncha bottles for the first time ever and also write a bunch of Thanksgiving Beer Pairings that we're pretty sure nobody read and we really hope nobody tried (except for the Barreled El Pulpo pairing, that one was legit).

We did it for you

And while we were at it, we also brewed Biere de Krampus in collaboration with our new friends at Stone Path Malt (it was made for the annual Pink Boots meeting) and we brewed FAO with/for our friend Dave from the Black Ale Project (well, Dave kind of is the entire project, but that's neither here nor there) and we also had our Annual Merch Explosion that we do every year because we like to have cool stuff around here. And speaking of buying merch, that reminds us of some sort of festivities that happen in...

December!

... when we released Marimba, the second beer this year made for an Original Gravity event and it was a heck of a time, except there were a lot fewer robots playing keyboards and people using cacti as instruments than there have been in the past but maybe that's all for the best. And since December is still happening at the time of this writing, there's not a whole lot else to mention (except for our twice-yearly release of Joybringer which is one of our favorite beers ever), so that's it for the year!

*deep breath*

And with all that said, looking back we can pretty safely say that we've accomplished our stated goal of "doing more stuff" but it's pretty safe to say we weren't expecting the amount/variety of More that the year brought. Sure, we've got more tanks and we're making more beer and we've got more space (which we're finally, hopefully, mercifully on the cusp of being able to fully use) and we're doing some pretty rad stuff in production that we weren't expecting to be doing by now (like bottles or funk beers) but also we've made a lot more beer (and/or beer-related) friends and worked on a lot of cool collaborative projects with them and it's rad to have as many cool friends (and/or friends who are huge nerds, but in a way that we appreciate) as we do.

We could not be more thankful for all we've been able to build and share with you.

But more importantly than any of that, we really feel like we've grown as a team. There's a lot more people working here than there used to be, and we (as in, Liz and Jared, the writers of this silly blog full of nonsense) still sometimes catch ourselves saying things like "we do all the brewing" but that's really not true at all anymore because there's five and a half people working in production (counting the two of us, of course) and we never in a million years expected we'd be willing or able to find people who we could trust to make our beer and represent us at fests and run the taproom and any of the other million things that happen around here. But we (as in, we as a company) are moving forward and getting our collective shit together and we've got a great team of people doing some pretty awesome stuff around here and it's positively friggin' heartwarming.

Thank you from Ben and Bubby and John and Maddy and Chris and Mike and Dave and Amanda and Jared and Grace and Tarah and Alyssa and Erica and Tom and Christine and Liz and Lindsay and Matt, plus also these other lovely humans we enjoy drinking with

And of course, none of this would be possible without you, dear reader (particularly but not exclusively those of you who manage to get through our weekly Wall O' Text here on the blog, especially since said rambling consistently fails to ever be about anything). A number of you have been around since The Early Days and some of you are pretty new around here, but that doesn't even matter because we're glad you come by. So thank you. Thank you for taking part in our ridiculous made up holidays and coming to our niche trivia nights and food contests and thank you for coloring our coloring contests and... thanks for being you. We're completely lucky as hell to have the team that we do on the production floor and on our side of the bar and out in the Great Big World, but we're even luckier to have you here with us enjoying the fruits of our labor.

So thank you.

It's been a ridiculous, exhausting, exhilarating year, and we can't wait to see what 2019 brings.

Ideally more beer. And snacks. Snacks are important too.

* By Jared, who likes numbers for some weirdass reason.
** It was not uncommon for them to order it as "The PS" because it's apparently Not Manly to say the word "pink?" Or something?
*** The first two are, in order, our birthday party and Horatio Day.
****Our automated keg washer.

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Oh Joybringer!

12/18/2018

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Well hello there! We're hunkerin' down and gearin' up for the most Festive time of year - which is obviously the birthday party for a cartoon skeleton on January 5th and you should totally come because it will be rad - but first we got some other, some would say lesser, holidays that we gotta get cheery for so here goes!

Holiday pregame

This Thursday brings about our trusty cask, right on schedule as always, and this time it's more Marimba! And just to "shake things up" a bit, the dry hop charge this time around is a personal favorite of ours - piney, citrusy Comet!

YAY

Moving right along, this Friday is the newest installment of Inferno Night! We got the wheels turnin' with our friends from Brato and basically just told them to bring whatever the heck they wanted as long as it's spicy! Spoiler alert: it will probably definitely involve some kind of sausages and also probably something that's, like, practical joke spicy and also all of it is gonna be delicious so you should come out and get your spice on!

Nashville hot melt. Carolina reaper sausage. Duck fat Buffalo wings. Hopefully a minimum of heartburn.

And for all you wait-until-the-last-minute holiday shoppers out there, this Saturday we're throwin' a Last-Minute X-Mas Party! And in the true spirit of the season, we're completely slapping something together last minute and trying desperately to make it look like it's not totally half-assed.

Christmassy things!

The taproom will be decked out in Christmas decorations that you're pretty sure we got from Home Depot, possibly that morning. Underneath our tree, you'll find a bunch of presents that appear painstakingly-wrapped from a distance, but which bear a strikingly similar resemblance to the TV remote and the spare air filters for our heater; they'll be placed just so in order to hide the giant wads of tape which actually hold them together (and which, in turn, belie the fact that we don't actually know how to wrap presents. We might even add some gift bags brimming with still-folded tissue paper to complete the "this was wrapped by a dude" visual effect). And yes, they'll have Christmassy nonsense on the To/From tags, but it'll be vague enough that we can guarantee nobody dares open them, and even then we'll probably screw up the To/From placement so it'll say something like "From: You Know Who, To: Santa."

As an added treat, we might even serve Jared's "Family Recipe" eggnog which is made by the painstaking process of buying eggnog from the store* and pouring it into a glass. And to serve with that special yuletime treat? You guessed it, a Festive Holiday Platter overflowing with all the brightly-colored cookies that were the only thing left at Costco because nobody else wanted them. (And also we'll have beer and candy pairings because that's the sort of thing we like to do around here.)

But when we get to drinks you'll see where our priorities truly lie, because we will be stocked up on the giggle juice. We'll have Biere de Krampus on tap if you want a fast-track to some holiday cheer, and we'll have eight different bottles both for here or to go, thereby ensuring you can be The Most Thoughtful Gift-Giver whilst never having to leave the bar. And what, praytell, will be bringing our bottle count up to eight? You guessed it, Joybringer and it's barrel-aged sibling** Joyrider will be available in bottles starting on Saturday!

And if all that weren't enough, we're offering a discount on all (non-alcohol) merch all dang day! So if you missed your chance to stuff some stockings, come on out and get the goods!

Oh! And speaking of Joybringer, it's on tap right friggin' now! Come drink some and get festive with us!

* If you don't count that as "painstaking" then you've clearly never been to the grocery store right before Christmas.
** Cousin? We're oddly uninformed on how barrel-aging fits into beer genealogy.

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In Which The Protector Descends Upon Us

12/12/2018

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Hello again, one and all - friends and well-wishers and weird Russian internet-crawlers alike! We're here with beers and good cheer, so saddle up your internet stool and put on your "totally doing important work" face in case your boss happens to stroll by!

Pictured: important work

Gettin' right down to business, Doyle is now on tap! It's a big ol' fruity ol' basher of a beer, but we might have to stop calling it a "Brutal IPA" (and instead go back to "Super IPA") because apparently that's "confusing" and our explanation of "I dunno, we thought it was funny" is supposedly "entirely unhelpful" which is a little weird because that's kind of our entire deal around here but whatever, that's cool I guess.

Anyway it tastes like tropical fruit with a little bit of resiny goodness to balance it out and you should come try it before we drink it all.

And getting to even newer new beers, this week's on-schedule-as-promised bottle release is here! This time around it's The Protector, a never-before-seen barreled farmhouse ale that's just loaded with all kindsa awesome peach flavors (because it was brewed with peaches)! It's big-fancy-bottle-only for now (though you may well see it pop up on tap should you decide to grace us with your presence on Horatio Day), but that ain't stop it from bein' delicious, so come getcha some while the gettin's good!

Oak and vanilla and peach notes ALL UP IN

While we're on about good things for those of you who have a taste for the finer things in life, this Thursday brings the return of Simpsons Trivia! And we would have asked our host Chris if there was a theme for this month, but we're kind of scared to know whether or not he's thought about it at all yet, so we'll just assume everything is gonna be great!

Party times!

And speaking of party times, this Thursday predictably brings about another cask! This time we took staff-favorite Marimba and dry hopped the bejesus out of it with a whole buncha Belma! So get them tastebuds prepped up for a hop salad fulla strawberry, cuz Belma brings the berries and brings 'em strong!

Pictured: tropical nonsense

On a somewhat less-jubilant note (at least for all of you out there in TV Land), we will be closing at 5:00 PM this Sunday, December 16th for a private event.

We'll miss you too, but there's always next week!

And, of course, it wouldn't be a blog post in the month before Horatio Day without mentioning Horatio Day so, um, you should come to Horatio Day!

It is UPOOONNNN UUUSSSS

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Beers? Check. Snacks? Check. Laserbeams? Check.

12/4/2018

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Hi friends! Welcome back! We thought you might need some good tastes and fun times in your lives, so we did that up for y'all and now we're here to tell you about it!

First up on our Good Tastes and Good Times Tour, is Marimba - on tap right now! And what's Marimba, you ask? Why it's a tropically hoppy lil' grisette we brewed for the upcoming Original Gravity show (more on that in a bit) and it's nice 'n' dry 'n' fruity with just a touch of resiny pineyness and oh man we are just gonna swig the heck outta this one!

Come and get itttttt

And while we're on about swiggin' (except maybe the opposite of that), we got more Big Fancy Bottles comin' your way! We got all excited to hop on the Bottle Train that we figured we'd just keep on rollin' and what that means for you is a new bottle release every week from now until Horatio Day!

And the first in this Series O' Deliciousness is our first-ever bottle-conditioned beer, the long-awaited Ginger Extraordinaire! This boozy lil' delight has spent some long weeks and months slumberin' in a rye barrel, and we woke that sucker up with a ginger-infused slap in the face and now you get to drink some! It's got a more gentle mouthfeel from the natural carbonation, but hoo-wee is that the only thing gentle about this beast of a beer - tread carefully, for here be dragons!

Delicious, delicious dragons.

Speaking of things that we enjoy, this Thursday marks the next installment of Audio Triviality! When we asked Matt what the theme would be, he gave us a weird look and mentioned something about how it should be "obvious" so we're gonna assume it's mostly gonna be about ham and ham-themed songs.*

Fingers crossed for ham hocks and ham rock!

Anyway, back to beer for a minute, we got us another cask this week, starting on Thursday! And it's been a dang ol' long time since we've had Kelly grace the handpump with her presence, so we're tappin' a cask of Kelly! No funny business this time, just straight-up delicious cask action!

Pure liquid joy

And if that weren't enough cask for ya, we've got another, slightly different cask of Kelly (fortified with Amandine-soaked oak chips) goin' on tap somewhere else on Friday! More to the point, the sad lack of a NERAX North this year prompted the creation of a new winter cask festival - this time in close-to-home Watertown instead of the far-reaching frozen tundra of Salem or Haverhill like that other fest - and we're pretty durn stoked about it! There's casks from some local people who we ain't seen on cask before (Small Change is gonna be there? Yes please!), plus some pretty cool foreign stuff that we don't get to see too often (zwickel on cask? Sign me up!), so it should be a pretty rad time! Anyway, we'll be there, though not in any official capacity unless you count "hunkering down in the corner and getting increasingly louder with every successive round" to be an "official capacity" (and we do!).

Wheeeee!

Anyway. Beer. Here. There's beer! Here! And soon there's gonna be more! As a follow-up to our much-loved and short-lived Super IPA, Danzig, we brewed up another beer in a similar spirit: Doyle Brutal IPA! It's gonna be on tap at Home Base starting at some point on Friday, so come on out and get Brutal with us!

Any guesses as to what's next in this series?

Speaking of tasty things on Friday, we gon' have pierogis!** We got Jaju in the house all evening dishin' out the butter-fried dumplings and the dollops of sour cream and oh man I'm hungry just thinking about it.

Feast!

And while we're on about eats in the taproom, on Saturday we've got Speakeasy Donuts swingin' through for the afternoon! These folks are new to us in the taproom, but they sure as heck ain't new to our tastebuds because they do some crazy cool stuff with donuts and we're right chuffed to be hosting them!

I bet the figgy pudding donut is gonna be right pleasant with Biere de Krampus, just sayin'

Also on Saturday, should you decide to brave the mean streets of Brookline, we're gonna be at the Original Gravity show (which you may remember from several paragraphs ago)! The skinny of the gist is that the folks at OG put on a show featuring music from local composers whose music is paired with beers from local breweries. Our piece was "Incite" by Dan VanHassel and - as is our wont around here - we set the song on repeat and let the sounds write the recipe for us and in this case we came up with Marimba! So if that sounds like a cool event to you, or if you just want to see Jared be bad*** at public speaking, come on out!

It is unclear whether the pug in reading glasses will be attending

One final note on fun things, gettin' a bit further into Future Times, we'd like to put forth another (of many more to come) gentle reminder about our birthday-party-for-a-cartoon-turned-barrel-aged-beer-fest: Horatio Day! And as we mentioned before, there's gonna be hella beer and bacon and mac 'n' cheese and shenanigans, but we feel the need to stress one aspect of this day that we largely glossed over last time: the Horatio Costume Contest! See, we feel that the only appropriate way to celebrate somebody's birthday is by dressing up like them, so we're makin' that a part of our celebration! And I know we've got some pretty serious costumers**** out there, but we encourage you to dress up even if you're not completely in it to win it - nothing would bring us more joy than seeing a sea of Horatios milling about the taproom.

It tickles us just thinkin' about it

Oh! And in all that excitement we almost forgot to tell you who won the coloring contest this month! It was Amanda!

Adequate job, Amanda!

Our runners up!

* Does ham have a theme song? It should. Maybe something played on an organ that's set up so that every note almost (but not quite) sounds like somebody saying "ham."
** Or is the plural just "pierogi"? Whatever. Dumplings.
*** Like, just the worst.
**** That's almost definitely not the right word, but I'm not gonna look it up because I feel like that's an internet rabbit hole that might be best avoided.

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Cool Merch and Ridiculous, Made-Up Holidays and Casks and Concerts and All Kindsa Fun!

11/27/2018

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Hello again! Hello! How are you? We hope you're doing well. We also hope you're looking to read about all the cool stuff we've got for you, because that... that's pretty much all this blog is ever about.

Anyway. We've got fun things! The first fun thing is new long sleeve shirts! We liked them so much last year that we decided to bring them back, only we didn't want you to think we'd run out of ideas so now it's a different base shirt and new fun art and really it's an entirely different thing except for the sleeve length so come check them out! They're rad!

AND they come with a free spiffy shaker pint if you come on out to the taproom to grab it!

And while we're on about rad things that are similar to (yet still markedly different from) things we've done before, this Thursday brings us another cask! This time around it's food-pairing-favorite Nick! And just to "amp things up" we "decided" that we would "dry hop" this beer with a whole buncha Nugget! Nugget times!

And if you're tired of the turkey leftovers taking up the top shelf in your fridge, we! have! a! new! hot dog! It's made of pork and it smells awesome and comes slathered in delicious grainy mustard! Pork times!

And speaking of casks, we're gonna be at some cask thing next week! In short, our friend Randy - who was instrumental in getting us on the Cask Train in the first place - got sad that there wasn't gonna be any NERAX North this year (which, to be honest, was a giant bummer to us when we heard about it) so he's takin' control of the situation and/or his destiny and throwin' his own cask party next Friday, 12/7 in Watertown! It is, as you might imagine, likely to be a durn good time, so you should come check it out!

We're pouring Shut Up Kelly! Porter! And let's be honest, you've always wondering what the inside of that weird American Legion looked like. Here's your chance!

PLUS, if you're gonna be out and about next weekend anyway, you should come check out this other thing that we're doin' with some different friends* - namely, the Original Gravity show next Saturday 12/8! In short, the good folks over at OG pair local breweries with music from composers (also local? Except for that one time?) and then fun times happen! And what's more, we brewed up a special beer just for this event** called Marimba! So if you're a fan of beer or good times or maybe getting to watch a robot play a guitar (we haven't checked the setlist, but it's happened before), come on out!

Fingers crossed for an encore from the electric cactus!

But anyway. Back to now(ish). This Friday we've got some tasty times in the form of Deep Cuts Deli in our taproom all evening! And since it's statistically unlikely that you don't like sandwiches, you ain't got no excuse so we'll see you there!

Sandwiches!

Then on Saturday we've got some non-sandwich food (unless you're the kind of person who likes to take a really broad view of what constitutes a "sandwich" for the sake of starting arguments, but that's really neither here nor there) with pastelitos from Matilda's!

It's like if a sandwich was deep fried and also not a sandwich, but they're so good!

And! Lastly! We been so busy all up in that we've stone-cold/mostly forgotten to constantly remind you about our second-favorite day of the year: Horatio Day! Horatio is our dapper skull-and-mustache logo dude, and his birthday is in early January so we're doin' it up right and throwin' him a party! There's too much Excitement to contain in just one paragraph, so I'm gonna boil it up and throw it down in some bullet points for y'all:

Hey, if you're gonna throw a birthday party for a cartoon skeleton, you might as well go all out.

-Rare beer, barrel-aged beer, probably a new beer, all the beer! - we've got some cool stuff kickin' around in the ol' Barrel Keep, and we've been saving it for a special occasion, and really the Most Special occasion is one that you make up for the sake of having an occasion, so we're gonna tap all this awesome beer! Every so often throughout the day (schedule TBD) we're gonna throw on a log of limited-time, get-it-while-it's-here good tastes!
-Horatio Lookalike Contest - this seems pretty self-explanatory
-The Bacon Truck from Noon 'til Six! - also self-explanatory? Except they won't be in a truck, they'll be in our taproom, which means you can stay warm whilst filling thyself with bacon.
-Mac and Cheese Showdown! - starting at six PM, we're gonna have some food friends - notably the long-time rivals Brato and Bonetown - in to show off their Mac and Cheese Chops and you get to help determine the winner! And you do so by eating! It sounds like a hard day's work, but we believe in you.
-Cool swag! - we did it up proper with fancy gold-rimmed glasses last year, and it would be silly to let that tradition fall by the wayside.
-Probably cake! - honestly, cake just kind of shows up around here a lot of the time. Seems pretty likely there'll be cake at this thing.

And that's everything that we've got going on! Can I have wine now?

* "Come to Bone Up, the Brewery with Upwards of Two Friends™"
** And also probably a little while after this event, unless we somehow manage to drink just a ton of beer at this thing.

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The Turkeyday Cometh!

11/20/2018

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Hello, friends! The time for pie is almost nigh, and we've got some special treats lined up for all y'all!

First and/or foremost, this Wednesday* (also known as Right Now) is a pretty durn big day around here. One might even call it a Landmark Occasion if one were so inclined (and we aren't). Anydangways, the main rub of the point is that it's our first-ever real-ass bottle release! And to make sure it's an Extra Special Event, we're puttin' out four - count 'em, FOUR - Big Fancy Bottles! Here's the sweet deets on what we gon' have:

- El Pulpo, 8%, imperial stout aged in rye barrels.
- Shelby, 8%, smoked stout aged in apple brandy barrels.
- Doomrider, 8.2%, farmhouse aged in wheat whiskey barrels.
- Quadless Leg Monster, 10%, quad aged in brandy barrels.

We even came up with a game to play while you drink them: Shoes Off, Pants Off, Memories Off

Also of note, we've got fairly limited quantities of these (with Quadless Leg Monster and Shelby in particular being Very Limited in quantity) so we're gonna put some limits on them just to be on the safe side - two bottles per beer per person per day. That'll likely relax a bit/a lot once we get a handle on things (we currently have no idea what we're doing), but we ain't wanna risk disappointing people just because SOMEbody felt the need to buy eighty bottles of barreled El Pulpo.**

And speaking of El Pulpo, El Pulpo is on tap! Right now! And you should drink it! And for those of you not "in the know," El Pulpo is our Christmas beer and it's something we giddily look forward to every year and now it's here! It's a chocolate orange imperial stout and if you get a full pour it comes with a slice of chocolate orange so that you can a) have a pretty rad beer and candy pairing, and 2) fondly reminisce about eating this moderately-terrible candy in your childhood! Fun times!

"A Bone Up Tradition"

Anyway this whole barrel o' laughs is startin' strong on Wednesday (which, again, is probably either today or in the past), and then we'll be closed on Thursday and I would say something like "...which is a bummer" but brewers and bartenders need their turkey too, so you can probably make it through one entire day (especially if you stock up first).

Friday: leftover pie donations accepted by all members of our production staff

Which reminds me, we'll be open regular hours on Friday and also the rest of the weekend. So once you run out of things to talk to your family about (projected time: one PM on Thursday) and in the event you don't want to brave any of our nation's shopping complexes on the worst damned shopping day(s) of the year, you can come hang out in our taproom! There's nothing better to fill awkward gaps in conversation like stoner metal played at a moderate volume. And beer. Lots of beer.

Plus lots of fun merch! (And so begins the shameless holiday self promotion)

Anyway, as part of a "holiday tradition" that we "totally forgot to do last year," we wrote up a bunch of Thanksgiving Pairings for all our beer and now we'd like to share them with you!

We tried not to make our Thanksgiving sound too weird but here you go

Extra Naked
pairs well with... wishing you hadn't eaten so much the previous day
and if you don't have any Extra Naked, we suggest... shame eating

Key Lime
pairs well with... just one more piece of pie
and if you don't have any Key Lime, we suggest... having two more pieces of pie

Shut Up Kelly!
pairs well with... ooh! Somebody brought fudge?!
and if you don't have any Shut Up Kelly, we suggest... trying to convince your elderly aunt to do shots of Allen's Coffee Brandy with you

Wasted Life
pairs well with... a nap on the couch
and if you don't have any Wasted Life, we suggest... taking a nap anyway, albeit a less satisfying one

Barrel-aged El Pulpo
pairs well with... happily shouting
And if you don't have any Barrel-aged El Pulpo, we suggest... angrily shouting

Doomrider
pairs well with... trying to stack up three pies into one Megapie (also acceptable: Pie Sandwich) like you're friggin' Dagwood Bumstead or something
And if you don't have any Doomrider, we suggest... looking your younger sibling dead in the eye, snatching their (full) plate out of their hands, and eating the entire damn thing without breaking eye contact

Barrel-aged Shelby
pairs well with... trying to remove all the turkey skin in one piece so you can pretend to be Leatherface (which, in turn, means you won't need to share any turkey skin)
And if you don't have any Barrel-aged Shelby, we suggest... wrapping turkey skin around some bacon and cheese to make the world's least healthy burrito

Quadless Leg Monster
pairs well with... saying "you know, in England they refer to this as 'pudding'" every time a new dish gets passed into your hands
And if you don't have any Quadless Leg Monster, we suggest... dipping your turkey in pudding

Adelle
pairs well with... eating the whole shrimp ring before anybody else even realizes the hors d'oeuvres are on the table
And if you don't have any Adelle, we suggest... locking yourself in the spare room with the shrimp ring and whatever brown liquor you can get your hands on

Korey
pairs well with... pretending to care about sports
And if you don't have any Korey, we suggest... cleverly getting out of all sports-related conversations by claiming to be a fan of a historically-terrible team

Danzig
pairs well with... muttering "hail Satan" instead of "amen" when your weird aunt tries to make everybody say grace
And if you don't have any Danzig, we suggest... waiting until your weird aunt makes everybody hold hands and then gripping tightly and shouting your allegiance to the Dark One

Ruby Rye
pairs well with... murmuring noncommittally at your uncle's poorly-thought-out political opinions
And if you don't have any Ruby Rye, we suggest... shouting "that's them Demmycrats for ya" every time there's a break in the conversation/ranting and wondering if he'll ever realize you're just impersonating Abe Simpson and not actually agreeing

El Pulpo
pairs well with... constructing increasingly-elaborate forts with your youngest relatives
And if you don't have any El Pulpo, we suggest... acting so erratically at the dinner table that you get banished to the kids' playroom to go watch Dumbo like six times in a row because that's somehow the only movie they have. Again.

Hartshorne
pairs well with... knitting
And if you don't have any Hartshorne, we suggest... secretly feeding treats to your neighbor's dog over the back fence until the dog gets kind of pudgy and then insistently calling your neighbor "Ol' Fat Dog Jones" until the end of time or until they move

Bullhead
pairs well with... wondering how in hell "parades on TV" is supposed to be a tradition
And if you don't have any Bullhead, we suggest... participating in the only acceptable Thanksgiving tradition (drinking carbombs)

Nick
pairs well with... friggin' turkey. Come on, man. It's Thanksgiving.
And if you don't have any Nick, we suggest... making better life choices

* We know this day as Shitty Wednesday, both because of traffic and because of the likelihood of seeing like six people you went to high school with should you so much set foot outside the house when you go back to your hometown for the annual turkey-and-yelling extravaganza.
** GRACE

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In Which We Drop Some Fresh Can Art On Ya!

11/13/2018

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Well hello again, friends! We're starting to near that Very Special Time of Year - specifically, the most pie-and-beer-centric holiday that we happen to know of (and if there's more, please do let us know)! And as you may know, we're generally pretty big fans of pie, beer, and eating so much that our vision gets a little blurry and we start to maybe get a little worried, which means we've got a whole buncha wholesome fun and treats for all y'all!

Including, but not limited to, fresh new can art festooned with monsters!

That will be all.

And first on that list o' happenin's is Friendsgiving on Thursday! We teamed up with our friends from 3 Kitchens Catering and they're puttin' on a dang ol' feast and we got some tasty beers to pair with it! What's more, we made a special beer for this event!* It's a table beer made to honor the memory of Nick, a golden retriever who left us to go to the Big Dog Park in the Sky five years ago right around now. Given both Nick's coloration and the seasonality of this brew, we decided that we should go right on ahead and jam that dang ol' mash tun right fulla sweet potaters, which give the beer a nice dusky shine. And as an added bonus, it's tasty as heck and you should drink some!

A good beer for a good boy!

Speaking of tasty beers that go well with food, we're tappin' a cask of Bullhead on Thursday! And given this beer's nearness and dearness to our hearts, we went with the Tried and True on this cask: an extra heapin' helpin' of Rakau!

Pictured: not Bullhead

Movin' right along, if you happen to be out and about in the Big Scary World this weekend (which we don't often recommend, it's much comfier here in the taproom), on Saturday we'll be slingin' samples and reppin' strong at Hops & Knots at the MIT Museum this Saturday! We've been to an event similar to this in the past (that one was "Beers & Gears") and it was a tonna fun - basically it's a bunch of people drinking and working in small teams on some weirdass Rube Goldberg machine (which is apparently gonna be knot-themed this time?) and then all of those get combined into a bigger and weirder contraption. Anyway, it should be a blast even if it does seem like they're trying to trick you into learning A Very Valuable Lesson About Teamwork.

But hey, there's beer, and beer makes everything more fun!

Oh! And! You know that thing that y'all** have been asking us for since basically the time we opened? Well, we listened, and then we pretty much did whatever the hell we wanted anyway and came up with something that's almost - but not quite - entirely different from what was being asked for. Anyway my point is that soon we're gonna have Big Fancy Bottles! And to celebrate such an auspicious occasion, we've been diggin' around in our barrel room*** and rootin' around in our cellars and checkin' on all our backstock and just generally flinging fluids every which way and now we got some Tasty Times all up in them bottles - Old Favorites and New Delights alike!

And they look pretty dang good, if we do say so ourselves.

Anyway, for more details we're doin' it up in easy**** FAQ style:

When will bottles be available?
Hopefully starting this week! We've got a couple things all bottled up for your enjoy that are waiting for some Finishing Touches, and for Later Times we've got a whole buncha good stuff lined up!

What beers will you be bottling?
Mostly barrel aged stuff - currently we've got Doomrider (remember Doomrider? It's back... in bottle form!) and Quadless Leg Monster and soon (as in, ready for Thanksgiving) we'll have barrel-aged El Pulpo and hopefully/probably barrel-aged Shelby at some point and then maybe some other stuff too.

Where can I get these delightful bottles of goodness?
At the brewery, of course!

Anywhere else?
Nah.

Seriously?
Are you seriously expecting us to change our answer if you keep asking the same question?

Will that work?
It never has before.

How much will they cost?
Come on, man. Be cool.

* And also more generally we made this beer to pair with turkey and/or gravy, and hoo-wee is it gonna be good with turkey and/or gravy.
** Maybe not you specifically, but it comes up often enough that I wouldn't be surprised if you did ask us about this at some point.
*** It's really more of a "shelf in the corner under a pallet rack" but maybe just let us have this one?
**** To write

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