In Which We Celebrate Five Years

"Also in Which You Get an Up Close and Personal View of Our Faucets"

Howdy friends! We've got us an extra-special blogjam this week where we get all misty-eyed about things that pretty much nobody else cares about (which, if we're being honest, is probably the dictionary definition of "blog," but we digress), but first we gotta get on with the here and now, so here's the now!

We would show you a picture of the beer, but Modern Draught is cleaning the lines right now so we can't pour anything and we really should be watching the brewday instead of writing rambly captions so here is a picture of our funky barrels

First on up, we've got a brand-spankin'-new wild beer release that's draft only and available right now and that's Critters XII! Now, I know we said we were gonna tone it down on the numbered "Critters" releases in favor of larger batches of wild beers that have their Very Own Names, but sometimes we empty a barrel that's so damn tasty that we don't want to blend it with anything else, and so this time around it's a lovely little grisette that got a bucket's worth of buckwheat honey and it somehow ended up tasting kinda like strawberries and anyway we kegged it up and tapped it up and now you can drink some!

We've missed you.

And speaking of drinking, for the first time in 400+ days, we've got some indoor seats! Now, we're not goin' too buckwild here - our taproom is basically a wind tunnel if we've got the bay door open (which we will, right up until Octoberish) - but things are actually gettin' a bit safer out in the world and we figured we'd set up a place that's comfortable even if it's raining out (how outlandish! So 2019!). We're still keeping distance between all the tables and the walkways and all that safety stuff that has been a Major Priority for us over the past 419 days or so (we're not counting, you're counting), but we felt like we were ready for this step and now there's more seats!

(We still haven't fixed the window)

And lastly, as an addendum to this week's blog, we've got a bit of a Big Day coming up that means a lot to us behind the scenes - this Friday is the fifth anniversary of our first-ever Bone Up brewday! And this year we'll be doing what we do every year, which is nothing.

That's a virgin ass kettle right there

But seriously. It's been five years since we've brewed our first batch, and dang but if we don't get a little teary-eyed just thinkin' about how far we've come. For those of you who have been with us since the Old Times (which, considering the audience for this blog, is most of you), this story will probably be pretty familiar, but we're gon' tell it anyway...

Look at these kids with their dark bitter IPAs in shaker pints

Five years ago our production team* was just Liz and Jared (henceforth referred to as "we," since we're the ones who write the blog), and it was - to be perfectly frank - a fairly nerve-wracking occasion when we fired up the ol' brewhouse for our First Ever Brewday. We only had a couple years of professional brewery experience between the two of us, and our "test brew" on the new brewhouse (it's common to do a "dry run" using water) was maybe a little bit of a disaster. Long story short, several things melted - some to the point that they were permanently fused with other parts of the brewhouse - so we were maybe a bit gun-shy with the ol' burners for a little while. 

I'll spare you most of the boring details about that fateful first brewday (we tried measuring out yeast nutrient using a scale set to a unit that we didn't know existed,** one of the hoses exploded while filled with hot water, Jared dropped the Official Brewing Spoon, etc.), but the point is that at the end of that day, after we cleaned the trub out of our hair and changed into socks that weren't soaked in wort and chemicals and put ointment onto our various burns, it felt like we had really Accomplished Something. After years of buildout and permitting hell and putting together janky-assed systems*** because that was the best equipment we could afford, we were finally a Functioning Brewery. 

And like we do for most of the big moments around here, we took a deep breath and tried to appreciate the gravity of the situation or whatever, but mostly we just looked at each other and said "okay, what's next?" 

And that's not to say that we were so focused on Moving Forward that we couldn't stop to smell the roses, but more that we were acutely aware of how every new development had a tendency to add more line-items to our exponentially-increasing to-do lists. We'd set so many things in motion at that point that all we could do was keep moving - we were kind of like sharks, only stupider.

oMg PrEmIuM aLe

Anyway, if we're being perfectly honest, the beer that came out of that first brewday was hardly the best beer we've ever made (and our second batch was worse, but that's a story for another time), but it was still the first real tangible result of the months and years that we put into starting this brewery, and it'll always be something we look back on fondly. ​​

And that's probably why we've never tried to throw a Made Up Holiday around this particular milestone (though we do certainly love making up holidays), because it's essentially the turning point when this turned from a personal passion project into something that we were sharing with The World. That, and we try not to raise a big fuss about brewdays in particular - that's our job, it's just something we do. 

Unrelated: Joybringer is back in bottles

But also, as an aside to our aside, commemorating that brewday has had a bit of an unseen ripple effect on our beer menu that's still evident today. See, the first ever batch of Joybringer was brewed as a sort of brew-birthday present to/from ourselves. And Joybringer ended up being the base beer for our first-ever barrel-aged beer release (which was named Jollybringer, and we only had like one keg of it), and Joybringer is the base for our first-ever mostly-year-round barrel-aged beer (Joyrider), and also Joybringer is so good you guys.

Look at these kids with their tallboy hazies

But! That's enough of our navel-gazing trip down Memory Lane, except to say that we are absolutely stunned at how far we've come in such a short time. Five years ago, we were brewing beer into plastic tanks and bringing growlers to bars as product samples (which, if we're being honest, did not go over super well) and we had no idea if anybody would want to come out to our taproom, assuming it were to open at some point. And now we've got a crew of great people working for us and we're putting out a bunch of tasty beer and serving it in our rad beer garden and we've got two different barrel-aged beer programs going as side-projects and we're selling cans in stores and we've got a bunch of friends that come visit us and drink beers on the regular and to say the least the past five years have exceeded the wildest expectations that we even dared have when we set out to start this ridiculous brewery and we're just incredibly grateful that we've gotten to share the experience with so many great people and anyway we're gonna keep on keepin' on as long as we can, so we'll see you in the taproom!

* And our sales team, and our delivery team, and our general contractors, and our bookkeepers, and et cetera. 
** "Grains"
*** Our original brewhouse pumps were SO TINY. ​