Howdy, Neighbor

Get ready to welcome the Carolina Brewery to Atlanta next week. We will be pouring their Flagship IPA

and Sky Blue Golden Ale at Taco Mac Prado on Tuesday, May 7th. The owner of the brewery will be in town, so stop by and say hello if you are into that kind of thing. We have been selling these beers for a while in Charlotte, and they liked Taco Mac so much, they decided to start selling beer in Atlanta. They won a silver medal at GABF for Sky Blue last year, and their IPA won a gold in 2006. Long story short, these guys make good beer, and you need to drink it.

The following day at the Windward Pkwy Taco Mac we have our first cask of Monday Night Eye Patch IPA. This one has additional Topaz hops added to it, and should be really tasty. We are going to be dialing back our cask events this summer, so you may want to get in on this one. Wednesday, May 8th, 6:00 pm.

Friday the 17th we have a cask of O'Dempsey's Your Black Heart Russian Imperial Stout at The Fred Bar. We have done a ton of tricked-out casks with O'Dempsey's and they are always really good. Come out and celebrate American Craft Beer Week with us.

On Friday, May 31st we have a very special cask, created by one of our Chancellors, Drew Buehler. This is another O'Dempsey's Your Black Heart Russian Imperial Stout , but this one has figs, black cardamom, cocoa nibs, Jim Beam, and vanilla beans. We will be tapping it at 6:00 pm, Taco Mac Duluth. Come by and show Drew some love. He's a solid dude. You'll like him.

Stay tuned for more details on the 25 casks we recently made at SweetWater. Those are ready to ship, and I will be laying out a calendar with those dates very soon.

In case you still are not following me on Instagram, here are a few photos from my recent visit to Dogfish Head. If you were following me on Instagram (beer_fred_tmac), you would have seen these when I actually took them, and you would have seen about five times as many. But hey, it's a free country. You are free to see less cool pictures, and you are free to wait six days to see them. Whatever floats your boat.

Pretty nice day in Milton, DE

The building is strangely located, pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood of large, new homes. It is as if someone dropped a sizable, funky-looking brewery in the middle of a gated community in Alpharetta. Apparently it wasn't such a big deal when the brewery was small, but now the neighbors have their panties in a bundle over the amount of large trucks and hordes of tourists that are coming and going all day and night. Most people I know would give a limb to live in the shadow of Dogfish Head. Not these stiffs.

On the left here is a cone that holds the hops before they are shot into the brew kettle. If you don't get it, say the first two words kind of fast. There was another one called, "Ooooh, Me So Hoppy". Good stuff.

Below is part of an oak-aging tank. They had two. They are in the room with the Palo Santo wood tank. It looked a lot like this one, except it had a sign on it that said, "Palo Santo". The people at the brewery were extremely cool, and we got to try a really nice, light bodied pale ale called Firefly in their sensory tasting area. It is made for a big concert festival up there. If you guessed that it is called the Firefly Festival, don't be too proud of yourself please. It wasn't hard to deduce that.

That is all I have for now folks. Have a great week.