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!
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!
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!
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.
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)
(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.
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.
** 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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