It’s December. Are you ready for some beer?

It’s baaaaaack!

The beer we have

• Frank
• The Whale
• The IPA
• Stout Affective Disorder
• Heatrays
• Oh Snap!
• The Double IPA
• Nouveau Riche

That’s right, it’s the return of Oh Snap!¹, our spiced winter stout. We’ve taken Stout Affective Disorder and added ginger and Vietnamese cinnamon, making it taste suspiciously like a ginger snap! We made it very briefly last year, but we’re going to have it all month now!

The beer we will have

What, that’s not enough for you? Well, tomorrow we’ll also have another pair of offerings:

• Saison #1: with its hazy golden hue it combines peppery, citric and herbal Belgian yeast character with a wheaty malt body. Light floral notes and a hint of Hallertau Blanc hops round out the beer.
• Storm Warning: Sometimes our fair city gets walloped with snow. Sometimes driving is impossible. Sometimes the Just In Time supply system fails. So sometimes a brewery can’t make one of their usual beers because they’ve run out of grain. Storm Warning was brewed 10/24/14 with what we had. NY State 2-row barley, hops from Australia and New Zealand. The result is a juicy, sessionable APA that won’t be made again until the next disaster. Here’s to global warming.

Events in the next week

• Tomorrow: celebrate the anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition at Hydraulic Hearth
• Also tomorrow: Mister Goodbar’s Cask Festival, starting at noon. They’ll have The End Is Rye aged on rye soaked oak chips, and later in the weekend Mole Dick², which is The Whale with ancho chiles and cocoa nibs. For more information check out their Facebook page
• Saturday we’re having a tap takeover at Dinosaur BBQ! They’ll have The Whale, The IPA, Stout Affective Disorder and Oh Snap!
• While not technically in the next week, December 12, 13, 19 and 20 we’ll be having tastings at various Consumers from 1-4. Specific locations coming next week!

What else we’ve been up to

• Last Friday we hung out at Record Theatre during their Black Friday event
• We’re now on tap at Moor Pat
• This ain’t a scene, it’s a beer tasting, this month’s Session, in which I talk about my journey through the beer community
• Artvoice has Holiday gifts for the beer snob, and what’s that? Our growler card is mentioned!
• We also have hats back in stock, plus gift baskets. Remember the old adage: “people who say I’m hard to buy for must not know where to get beer.”
• Last night was session #2 of our D&D campaign. The full writeup to come on Tuesday, but: there was Pliny the Elder (!) and a whole buttload of low rolls on their part.

Other nifty beer things

• This week’s #sundayread, also a #longread and probably a few other hashtag-reads: How to make malt

And finally

• Daedalus and the cow suit: > Anyone who doesn’t want to read a poorly retold myth about a man who built a cow suit so realistic that it totally fooled a magic bull into laying down some absolutely quality homo-bovine dick and siring a minotaur should probably press J on their keyboard right now, but honestly if that synopsis doesn’t do it for you then you should probably just quit Greek mythology all together.
• Our collective reaction to that story: