Did you hear?

Let’s start this week off with a reminder that you’re now getting twice the content for your money! In addition to the weekly Thirsty Thursday posts, featuring news and updates about the brewery and our offerings, I’ve started a Tuesday series where I talk about more beer-adjacent topics. I’m calling it My Embeered Life for lack of a better title, and I have some exciting things planned. Some very exciting things. (for me, anyway)

The first post is The Long Overdue Kickstarter Post, Part Two, which is unsurprisingly a followup to the Part One that I posted in January. Next week will be a proper introduction, and then we’re off to the races!

Let us make you a mixtape

My proposal to officially change our name to “Community F’ing Beer Works” was, sadly, unanimously rejected

Also in that post is the first usage of a new plugin I wrote, allowing us to embed a video from Youtube at the top of a post. Click it! (or press enter if you’re not using a mouse) I added one to this post as well: they won’t all be Amanda Palmer, but I’m still finishing up the listen of Theatre is Evil that seemed appropriate for a Kickstarter post.

If you’d like to add the plugin to your own WordPress site, or just see how bad I am at coding, I tossed it up on Github. If you’re git-inclined, don’t forget I also pushed the code for the Progress Thermometer that graced our site before we were open as well as the keg tracking system we use.

If you want to use the keg tracker (which seems odd, if you aren’t a brewery, because how many kegs do you have?) let me know and I’ll finally get around to writing an install script.

Oh right, I occasionally talk about beer too

Soft Bulletin, hard stainless

Sorry! PHP talk’s done, I swear. Let us move on to the triumphant return of The Soft Bulletin! Starting today it’s back on tap, and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s our winter seasonal, and we’re going to consider it “winter” until, uh, well, until we don’t want to anymore. Think of our seasonals like seasons in Game of Thrones. Thankfully it’s already winter so you don’t have to see any Sean Bean image macros.

We’re able to add a fifth beer into regular production, as well as go on tap at Consumer’s sometime next month, thanks to our shiny new brite tanks! We’ve been constantly expanding our fermentation capacity since we opened last April, and with this we’re about done. For now. I’m sure next month I’ll have news on the new brewhouse we’re buying. (for the record, this is hyperbole)

What about one-offs?

Really? You consider The Soft Bulletin old news already? You’re a fickle one, dear reader.

Honestly, I just like including this image as much as possible now.

Well, fine. Fine. We’ve got some new stuff in the works. For one, Paul from Spider Bite Brewing in Long Island will be in town tomorrow, and as he and Rudy are RateBeer buddies they thought they’d make some sweet magic together. Expect something of a Belgian nature to come from their union.

Great. Now I have to think about spiders. Never liked spiders. Too many legs. Sneaky bastards.

On a less arachnid-focused matter, we’re also hosting a homebrew soiree soon, with members of the Niagara Association of Homebrewers, the Sultans of Swig and Junkshow Brewing stopping by to brew something for the awards banquet for the Amber Waves of Grain homebrewing competition.

If you’re a homebrewer who isn’t involved in at least one of these clubs, well, what are you doing? Life’s too short to be a lone wolf. You should at the very least enter what’s one of if not the biggest homebrew competitions in the state!