We're Twiddlin' Our Thumbs, But At Least We Got Art!

Hi there, good to see you! Come pull up a chair at our blog, we've got some good things for you to look at this week! Admittedly, we never intended to spend all our time rambling about cool art that we bought from artists we like, but we just can't help ourselves!* Through a weird set of coincidences, this week has been the second consecutive Art Week around here and we just gotta share it with you!**

But first: the closest thing you'll get to Real News from us this week! As some of you may have heard (or more likely not, since you probably don't spend your whole day reading beer news like some of us do), there's a bit of a hop shortage goin' around these days. Rumor has it that this won't be as bad as the Big Hop Scare of '07, but it's still gonna put the squeeze on a lot of people who don't have a good supply locked down. I won't bore you with much detail about how the hop industry works, but most Big Boy Breweries buy contracts for their hops, often 5+ years in advance. And even if we could predict our future sales that far in advance (we can't), we're small enough that when we try to contract for hops we basically just get laughed at, which has made things a little tense around here. But never fear! We just ordered a whole shitload of state-grown hop goodness from our friends at Four Star Farms! Maybe even two shitloads! So not only will we be able to keep you fine folks in IPAs for a good long while, we'll be doing it with hops grown right down the road (it's a long road). 

Another pic from our trip to the hop farm last month, because why the hell not

​But anyway, starting off our list of new things that'll probably*** go in the taproom, we just acquired the original art from this strip drawn by the fantastic Dave Kellett! If you're not already familiar with his work, there's a lot to choose from - the art we bought is from his newspaper-style strip Sheldon, but there's also Drive (his sci-fi comic) and Stripped (a documentary about comic strips, which he put together). He's a busy dude, but everything he makes is High Quality and we're stoked as hell get out to (hopefully) hang up some of his work for all to see!

Here is the web version of the comic in case you can't read it.

And there's more! We commissioned us another drawing of Horatio, this time by hirsute webcomic creator extraordinaire**** Randy Milholland! This one was a lot quicker than our last commission - we pretty much just handed him something with our logo on it and told him "feel free to get weird with it" (we also made a point of referring to Horatio as "dapper," which is something that will become relevant in a minute). An hour or two later, it was done! His only comment was "I didn't really know where you wanted me to go with this, so I made him a strongman," and personally I completely love that there's some direct link in Randy's mind between "dapper" and "loincloth." Anyway, as with all the artists we've been working with/buying from, we're huge fans of his work, so if you like things that are good then you should check out Something*Positive!

Jimbo's reaction to this was to clutch the drawing to her chest as a single tear of joy rolled down her cheek.

*You may be asking "are they just milking this for all they can because there's no other news?" You would not be wrong to do so. 
**This paragraph may have broken my previous record for Most Consecutive Exclamation Points. 
***I say "probably" in this case because we kinda forgot to ask him for permission to hang it in a public place. I don't entirely know the rules on that, but in general we prefer not to piss off artists that we like (especially since we've already weirded out a couple of them).
****Wait, that kind of makes it sound like the comic itself is hairy. Gross.