In Which We Briefly Stop Rambling About Our Birthday Party In Order to Ramble About Hot Sauce... At Our Birthday Party

​Hello again! It's been a week burstin' with bustle around here and we got heaps o' good things to prattle on about, so we gon' cut the shuck and jive and get on with the newsin'!

We weren't planning on leading with more excited rambling about our upcoming birthday party (it's in like two weeks! It's gonna be so much fun!), but we just found out some excitin'-ass news and we can't wait to tell you about it! See, we want this party to (at least partly) be a celebration of all the awesome people we've worked with over the past year, so to keep y'all full of treats during the earlier parts of the day we invited Fat Boyfriend Bakery (for beer ice cream and some pretzel-related treats) and Alex's Ugly Sauce (for hot sauce flights) and Top Shelf Cookies (for delicious cookies, some of which are made with Alex's Ugly Sauce potentially all of which can be used to make an ice cream sandwich with Fat Boyfriend's beer ice cream). We've been pretty stoked to have such a good crew comin' to hang out, and then - entirely unbeknownst to us - Alex went and made a friggin' hot sauce to be released at our party! We haven't even tried it yet and we're pretty sure we don't want to eat other condiments ever again. ​

If only we could have filmed Jimbo's reaction to this picture (it almost broke her)

Anyway, back to the "task at hand," those of y'all who have been in the taproom lately might have noticed our beer menu lookin' a little... beat up these days. There's reasons behind that but they're boring so we'll just cut to the part where we announce new beers!

First up is Gnasher - a grisette - which is gettin' released on Thursday! A grisette, for those of you who may not know (and in all fairness, it's a style we hadn't really heard of until a couple months before we brewed one), is pretty similar to a saison. It's a session-strength, spice-forward, smooth-sippin, thirst-quenchin', palate-pleasin' pleasure of a beer that we've been just itchin' to brew (it's been on our To Do list for, like, three months). Our take on the style is on the malt-focused side with a dash of sweetness and a (small) handful of fruity New World hops that provide a swell backdrop for all them grains. We predict you gon' enjoy. ​

Swimming into a glass near you!

Speaking of Thursday, we're also puttin' on a cask of our favorite beer to cask up - Extra Naked! This one's featuring another one o' them experimental yet-to-be-named hop varieties: HBC 472! According to the literature, this lil' hop has some interesting flavor characteristics  - it's floral coconut-y and earthy* and woody - which probably means the head of our cask filling department relied fairly heavily on the rule of manual proximity** in this case, but that just means we'll get one hell of a Flavor Experience™!

Hops with codenames are the most fun hops

And to go with all that tasty beer, we've got Sillari's comin' through with another round of bar bites! This time around it's meatball parm subs, so we suggest you put on your eatin' pants and maybe also take a tip from the Pizzaman himself and put on a red shirt. That way it can double as a napkin!

Your date will be impressed.

And if all that weren't enough for ya,*** we're also releasing yet another wedding beer on Thursday! This one's titled Cosmic Showers of Love, and it's a lovely ol' double IPA that's just out of this world!

This one goes out to our new friend Peter, who helped out with Lead Brewer responsibilities on brewday (janitorial work followed by drinking)!

And the next couple Fridays we're doin' something called "Hippea Hour" but I don't know what that is. Vegan cheetos?

We'll find out.

And to go with all that healthy snackin', we've got Sillari's back in for Fancy Pizza Fridays! Just how fancy will it be this week? It is a mystery. 

Then on Saturday we got us another cask o' Extra Naked, only this time it's dry hopped with house-favorite Idaho 7! Idaho's a peachy, fruity delight and it'll brighten ol' Extra Naked right up, which would make it the perfect pairing for some sort of weird cheese/bread hybrid. If only we had some way of gettin' this mythical snack into our faces...

It just so happens that on Saturday we've got Boston-based Cozinha servin' up pao de quejo and lil' sandwiches! She's slingin' her treats the old school way and only accepting cash, so a stop at the ATM for cheese roll/pinball money will be key. But you should come! Right when we open! And sit around drinking until we can give you snacks!

There can be nothing wrong with this plan. ​

Anyway. Moving on. In addition to these cool new beer releases this week, we've got some cool new beer releases coming up soon! Fermento-Tainment, our Weisstronauts-inspired bitter, is sittin' in the tanks, and we're currently brewing up some extra special beer for a good cause! How special, you ask? Special enough that it needs its own paragraph.

Read more about the cause here: Black Ale Project

A little ways back we got to talkin' with Dave from the Black Ale Project, and he laid down the skinny on something that we're proud to say we're a part of! The short version of the story is: partner breweries brew a black ale of some sort and donate some or all of the proceeds to a veteran-related charity of their choosing. For our beer contribution, we decided to trot out our take on a Schwarzbier (which is named FAO - at least until we get yet another C&D in the mail). And for our fundraising, we're changin' things up a little bit - we're getting some pretty rad custom glassware printed up to go with this beer, and if you buy a pint you can keep the glass for an extra $2, which will be donated entirely to charity (we're still in talks with some people, but the destination of the donations will be decided before the beer is out). We figure it's win-win-win: you get to drink beer, and get a cool souvenir, all for a good cause! If all goes according to plan (and it should), it'll be on tap in two weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for more details!

And speaking of things that are happening in the future, we've gotten wind of the themes for the next two installments of Audio Triviality, our monthly music-themed trivia event! Taking a bit of a departure from this month (which some people seemed to think was "too specific"), September's theme is "the 90's." We've been told that there would be a minimum of questions about the Spice Girls (ideally somewhere in the zero range), so we'll color ourselves cautiously optimistic! And for October... let's be serious, there's really only one option for October trivia themes (three hours of questions about Glenn Danzig). 

And this is where I'd write my sassy outro if I could think of anything. Cheers!

* Which is a polite way of saying it might kind of taste like dirt. 
** In that he picked the one closest to his hand. 
*** Dang man, what are you holdin' out for?