Hello! Hi! How are you? We're just... dandy around here and we figure that's reason enough to celebrate with somethin' fancy, and that's just a goshdarn lucky coincidence because we've got fancy treats on the brain!
But wait! Before we get to all that, we gotta tell you all about the sweet merch that we got to go with that tasty beer what we released last week! Long story short, we liked the can artwork for this year's Pride beer enough that we wanted it on a shirt and then we realized that we're the ones who decide what goes on our shirts, so we made some! We've got tanks and t-shirts and a portion (10%) of the proceeds is goin' to LGBTQ organizations and you should come get one! Or several!
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Anyway. Back to beer. First on up, we've got the last - absolute* last - of our stash of Skeleton Key (which, if you're new in town, is our tequila-barrel-aged double Key Lime) in bottles and up for grabs! So if you're a fan or if it strikes your fancy, come on out and get while there's still gettin' to be got, 'cuz this beer takes eight months (and a tequila barrel) to make, so it ain't makin' a comeback anytime soon!
But we ain't just got the (re) return of some delicious old favorites, we've also got new stuff! More to the point, we've been keepin' busy scurryin' around in the ol' Barrel Hold and we discovered a whole buncha funky stuff that's ripe for the plucking and in more concrete terms that means new Critters beers!
First out the gate (this week, barring any Equipment Issues) is the creatively-titled Critters VII! This one started out as a Bière de Miel before its protracted dance with Brett and oak and also we added a bunch of bergamot puree because we thought it would be fun and dang but this is a tart 'n tasty treat! There's a pinch of honey and a punch of citrus and a strong suggestion of funk and honestly it's kinda what we always hope for when we see "sour" used as a style descriptor** and we hope you like it!
Next on up (next week? Probably?) is, shockingly, Critters VIII! This one's a sour brown that's been patiently resting in its barrel for nigh-on 600 days with naught but a bit of plum puree to snack on, but it's finally ready and resplendent in all its funky, tart, brown glory!
And as a bit of a "wrap up" on them ol' Critters beers, we feel like it bears repeating that the Critters series tends to be pretty "small batch," which is saying something coming from a brewery whose brewhouse is smaller than a lot of other breweries' pilot systems. Anyway, we're not tryin' to get all "scarcity marketing" on you or whatever, but we also don't want you to be bummed if/when we run out, so consider yourselves duly warned and so on.
Lastly, we feel like we should address a question that we've been getting quite frequently as of late, namely: what's the deal with reopening? And boy, do we have an unsatisfying answer for you!
Long story short, the deal is that we have no idea what the deal is because nobody will give us a straight answer about anything. Will we be allowed to serve beer outdoors next week? We don't know, nobody will tell us. Will we be able to expand our outdoor space once we do reopen? We don't know, nobody will tell us. What will taproom service look like? You get the idea. But! We can tell you what we do know, so we're at least on the same footing, vague-knowlede-wise, so here it is in handy-dandy bullet-point format!
Long story short, the deal is that we have no idea what the deal is because nobody will give us a straight answer about anything. Will we be allowed to serve beer outdoors next week? We don't know, nobody will tell us. Will we be able to expand our outdoor space once we do reopen? We don't know, nobody will tell us. What will taproom service look like? You get the idea. But! We can tell you what we do know, so we're at least on the same footing, vague-knowlede-wise, so here it is in handy-dandy bullet-point format!
- Taprooms are included in Phase II of reopening
- Phase II (or possibly just the first, uh, phase of Phase II) only includes outdoor seating. So no indoor seating and no standing-room.
- We don't know if we'll be able to increase our outdoor space, but we're doing everything we can to make that happen.
- Our number one concern is making sure that customers and staff are safe, which means we'll be going into this slowly and carefully. Probably frustratingly so. But there's no set standard for what we're doing, so it seems foolish at best to just throw a couple tables outside and let things sort themselves out.
- Our sculptor said there were "structural and legal problems" with our idea for a marble sculpture of Horatio shooting beer out of his eye sockets, so we're no longer expecting to have that as the centerpiece for our outdoor space once we reopen.
* We're at least, like, forty percent sure about this
** Which doesn't bode well for how it will go over with the sour-seekers, but that's neither here nor there
** Which doesn't bode well for how it will go over with the sour-seekers, but that's neither here nor there
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