Unicorns and Sausages (But Not Unicorn Sausages)

​Hello again, true believers! We're nearing the end of our Action Packed* Month O' Fun, but we've got one more Big Ol' Weekend lined up to give you some more Fun Times! We've got three beer releases and a sausage party and all that other stuff we usually do like casks pretzels and pizza and games and beer and good times and friendship. 

Anyway. Let's "get down" to the "nitty gritty" on these beer "releases." 

First up is a pair of beers that we brewed to celebrate the upcoming nuptuals of our first-ever** employee! To celebrate this most auspicious of occasions, we're trottin' out a Quad (named Quaddles) and a Grapefruit Witbier (named Lil' Witeon)! And as you've seen from us before, these here beers are meant to be blended at serving to make a beertail, which this time around we're calling The Gruncle! It's like three beers for the effort of two! And while the Big Day isn't for a couple weeks yet, the happy couple has given us their blessing to go on and release this mess in the taproom whenever we dang well please, and we dang well please to release them this Thursday! Come drink them!

PLUS we found out the bride's mom's cat is named Dipper. 

And on top of all that goodness, we're also releasing our wet hop, So Nude! To make this beer extra special, we took our everyday Extra Naked recipe and replaced all the ingredients with Massachusetts-grown versions of the same things! So in addition to bags and bags of fresh as hell Pepite*** from Four Star we've got a bunch of locally grown barley and corn from Valley Malt! And while it is the same base recipe as Extra Naked, it's really quite a different beer - it turns out that if you replace all of the ingredients in a recipe with different ones, you end up with a completely new thing! Who knew? And if there's one lesson we weren't expecting to learn from this experience, it's that the corn we grow around here has way more flavor than the stuff we normally get - which means that ol' Pepite is gettin' served up with a side o' cornbread!

Figurative cornbread, of course. (Though you're welcome to bring your own)

But speaking of wet hops, we've got some bummer news. Due to some agriculture/climate/farming issues that we only sort of understand, Four Star Farms basically couldn't harvest Rakau this year. This actually ends up being a hella bummer for a bunch of reasons:

1. They're good people and this is a hella sucky situation for them to be in. 
2. We use kind of a lot of their Rakau. 
3. We were two friggin' days away from getting fresh Rakau to brew a wet hop version of Bullhead. 

So we'll only be brewing one wet hop this year, instead of the two we'd originally planned. And as longtime readers of this blog (both**** of you) may remember - Bullhead was originally intended to be a wet hop beer last year but the harvest got rained out on our brewday so we brewed it anyway with normal hops, like chumps. But it did end up being a silver lining, since that's one of our all-time favorite beers we've ever brewed, and we've already got all the other stuff on hand to make it, so we gon' make some Bullhead!

As for our own Rakau supply, never fear! We've still got plenty of that aromatic goodness on hand due to the fact that our previous hop orders were based on wildly inaccurate projections! Hooray for guessing!

That one time we bought ​all the hops

But back to the task at hand, we've got even more cool stuff comin' your way this weekend! We've got Shut Up Kelly! on cask, and this time around we decided to take something that people have enjoyed in the past - namely, throwing liquor-soaked oak chips into the cask - and mix it up a bit: this time around we're servin' Kelly aged on oak chips that have been soaked in GrandTen's Amandine! Not familiar with Amandine? That's cool, we weren't either until we went to GrandTen one day. In short, it's an almond liqueur with a twist: it actually tastes good. But you ain't gotta take our word for it, come on by and see what kinda fun tastes it adds to Kelly!

Good taste!

And to add to this pile o' fun, we're hosting a beer and cookie pairing with Top Shelf Cookies this Friday night! We just got the cookie menu in today and sweet baby Buzzo is it looking scrumptious. Come on down from 5-9 and start your weekend off right proper!

Daaaannngggg!!

Plus! Our last big ol' sendoff to summer is happening on Saturday! Moody's Deli is returning with some sort of heating element on wheels and settin' up a meat station in our parking lot! We're celebrating the finer things in life - beer, sausage, pretzels, friendship, etc. - from 12-8pm and you should come down and say hello!

Everybody loves sausages!

And! In the interest of reminding you about this more than 24 hours in advance, we're a little over a week away from the October installment of our loosely-music-themed trivia night: Audio Triviality! And since it's October, the theme will be exactly the one you'd expect (fifty in-depth questions about Glenn Danzig and only Glenn Danizig). So come on out and answer some ridiculous questions as posed by our ridiculous trivia guy!

We hear he has a fine collection of literature

And to end this week's post with some feelgoods, we're wrapping up our first contribution to the Black Ale Project with a $500 donation to Team RWB this week! Our beloved black ale, F.A.O., has kicked,  but we'd like to thank you all for your enthusiastic support of the projects and for giving them sweet tallboy glasses loving homes! 

Cheers! Photo credit Matt Darcy / @bananamasher

* And frankly a little exhausting.
** If you wanna get all technical about it, he was one of two who got hired at the same time, but that just don't read as good. 
*** It comes from the same heritage as Nugget, but it ain't like any other Nugget out there that's for sure (it's better). 
**** Hi Jeff!