I just got home from a CBW meeting. We discussed the operating agreement, the layout of the building, did a vertical tasting of three APAs fermented with different yeasts and generally hung out and had a good time. We declared me assistant secretary, then immediately assistant to the secretary, then undersecretary, then finally assistant to the undersecretary.

My point is that I need to provide the yang to the aforementioned yin: it’s really easy to get lost in the fantasy of how awesome it will be to make beer, and I think we almost have a duty to let people know that it is not all drinking and laughing and diving around in money, Scrooge McDuck style.

We were not posing. This is how we look, all pensive and serious.

But guys and gals, we are going to make beer and it is going to be awesome.

Rudy tweeted as much earlier this week: this stuff, that we’re doing right now because we really enjoy it? We’re going to get paid to do it. It is going to be our duty to hang out and make beer and listen to Axis: Bold As Love. I came to this conclusion a few months ago. Do you know what my job is going to be? To write, make beer, run CBW’s archives and tweet. If we could somehow work ‘playing lots of Rock Band’ into the mix that would be great, but as it stands this is set to be the most perfect job of all time. I will be paid to use Twitter.

Not only that, but the additional benefit of having a group running the business, besides having an architect and a brewer and a guy who does absolutely everything (that would be Dave), etc, is that your business is to spend a lot of time with your friends. I’ve known some of CBW for a few years and some for less, but the key thing is that we all get each other. We don’t discover new things about each other: we discover things we have in common.

We’ve declared that there will be a game of Carcassone running in the back office at all times.

This week on Craft Beer Talk Ethan said we would be naming a beer after a Pixies song. That probably won’t happen, but it would still be cool, right?

Last night I bemoaned the fact that CBW wasn’t instead named Ewige Blumen Craft Beer. That would be a silly thing to name a brewery, but I know that while no one would think that’s a good idea they would understand why I would say such a thing. Our beer will contain at least 5% fnord by volume.

Underneath that forced smile is barely contained loathing for me at the moment, but beneath THAT is genuine affection

(The TTB asks that you register the recipes of any beer that has ‘nontraditional processes or ingredients.’ I hope they don’t read this and ask us what the nutritional properties of a fnord are, because I’m not sure what to tell them.)

Dave’s ringtone is the ‘please pass the milk please’ section of They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips. It’s the same clip I used for the Windows shutdown noise when I insisted on changing all of our computer’s sounds in high school. Every time someone calls him I smile.

Does this make sense? It’s very important to show people that starting a brewery is not all sunshine and lollipops, but I also want to make it very clear that we have a whole goddamn lot of sunshine and lollipops. And not Dum Dums either: I’m talking full on Tootsie Roll Pops and Ring Pops. The whole works. We’re in the process of starting something very special, and we’re having a ball doing it.

I hope that’s something that you can taste when you finally have our beer.