In Which It's Really Real!

Howdy friends! It's really real! It's really happening! Thassright, this week marks the much-anticipated release of our Illustrated Compendium of Weird Bugs, and What Their Names Might Be If They Were People. And since there's been such an outpouring of support for this project, we're also including an exhaustively-researched appendix detailing whether or not we'd be friends with said bugs (again, if they were people), along with reasons why!

But seriously though. This Friday marks the release of the final* anniversary beers and anniversary swag! And also since we're feelin' fancy we decided to go on ahead and release some other beers as well, just for kicks. Anyway, that's way too much news to cram into one lil' ol' paragraph (our editorial staff** has some sort of issue with giant, unbroken walls of text), so read on!

First on up is the seventh and final birthday beer: Control Is In Your Command! And since this is the fourth dang time we've made a Weisstronauts-inspired beer, we figured we'd make a beer that more-or-less perfectly encapsulates the way we feel about their music - which is to say that it's wonderful, but it's also very hard to explain.

​Anyway, for this particular beer we took some Double Key Lime that we'd been aging in a Summer Reserve barrel (for those that aren't in the know, Summer Reserve is an intensely blueberry-forward liqueur made by our friends around the corner at Short Path) and we threw in some Ginger Spectacular and just a splash of regular Key Lime for balance and whoa nelly is there a lot goin' on in this beer! But! Even with all that nonsense, the flavors play nicely with each other and work towards a Harmonious Whole or whatever and anyway it's available in bottles and possibly on draft starting on Friday!

And. AND. To complete the whole anniversary theme, we're also releasing our mix CD on Friday! We gathered up some songs from all seven bands what woulda been playing at our party and put 'em on a CD!*** And it's probably worth mentioning that a portion of the proceeds from CD sales will be donated to the ACLU, and the remaining portion of the proceeds will be going directly to the contributing bands!

And since we're puttin' out that ol' Mix Tape on Friday, we'll also be releasing its associated mix pack the same day! You've already heard us mention that we brewed beers for each of the bands (and if you hadn't, now you have), so we're crammin' 'em all into one weirdass seven-beer mixpack (six cans and one bottle) so you can enjoy the beer and music pairings without having to buy several cases worth of beer! (We do still encourage buying several cases worth of beer if you so desire). And if you're in the ol' Beer Garden and you wanna do the ol' Anniversary Flight like all the cool kids are doing, we'd be happy to oblige (and by "oblige" I mean "throw a mix pack and a bunch of cups on the table and let you sort it out"), but we can't legally give you that much beer at once (at least not for On Premise Consumption) unless you're in a group of at least four, so maybe plan ahead if that's your plan.

And if you wanna double down on all our sweet birthday merch, we will be offering a deal for you starting this very weekend! Grab the CD, mixpack, two can glasses, stickers, and a tank top/t-shirt for $85 with our Cool Kid Anniversary Bundle!

Includes:

• All seven band beers
• The physical CD with art booklet
• Digital playlist
• Two can glasses
• Fistful of stickers
• A t-shirt or a tank top in your size

How friggin' cool is that?! 

Anyway. Moving on from anniversary-related shenanigans and into regular ol' shenanigans, we've got a new beer coming out in cans on Friday! This here's the latest installment in our series of "IPAs that we dumped a bunch of fruit in" and then we completely lost momentum when it came to naming the beer**** and now you can have some Mango Thango!

But wait! We have more beers for you to drink! The last addition to our Beer Family is Zoopah!, which was brewed to showcase Zuper Saazer, a hop grown by our friends at Hop Head Farms! Now, Hop Head Farms has put a bit of effort into drumming up interest in this hop, which has been tricky since it's kind of new and interesting, but its flavor profile doesn't include any fruits that nobody is actually familiar with (and thus there are fewer people saying "it doesn't really taste like that") (we're looking at you, gooseberry, lulo, lychee, passionfruit, papaya), and it's kind of historical, but not enough so that people can be snotty about it. We happened to be intrigued by the Free nature of these hops, so we used some on the tacit/unspoken agreement that we would give them free marketing/awareness/whatever in exchange. (Consider that deal honored!)

Anyway, we're pretty sure this is Michigan-grown Saaz (unless it's some other hop that has saaz as a parent? Unclear), and Saaz is a Noble Hop, which sure does sound fancy, don't it? But what is a noble hop, anyway? Well, depending on who you ask, you'll get two very different answers: a) something about history and tradition and Europe and they might even use words like "terroir" and "landrace" in a way that almost but not quite convinces you what those words mean, or 2) it's a marketing term that was made up by the hop industry, and a relatively recent one at that. Anyway, we got a whole buncha this hop and we threw it into a grisette and now we'll all get to see what it's about, as a family. 

* Probably final, anyway. I can't even keep track anymore. 
** Liz. 
*** We did consider cassettes, but we figure at least some people still probably have CD players. And before you ask, vinyl would have been crazy expensive and there are very few people who would be willing to pay $65 for an EP that we compiled. 
**** We seldom start with a real name for the beers we make (which is why we draw inspiration from such diverse sources as "caller ID" or "thing Jared found on the ground" or "Jeff") and one time we named a beer after a note in the brewlog that was just an acronym for the specialty ingredients in the grain bill and anyway that's how we got our first Cease & Desist.