Brewer's notes:

 

There's a lot to unpack here, but let's start with a story. Five years ago, two of my homebrewer buddies and I decided we would sit through the entire Star Wars Holiday Special. Not the new one that just came out, but the awful one from 1978. Star Wars was insanely popular at this point and the creators captured this zeitgeist with a 70s era variety show consisting of celebrity cameos, musical acts, and groan-inducing jokes. At almost 2 hours long, it's difficult to sit through. The first 20 minutes has no spoken dialog - it's just wookies growling and grunting at each other. The three of us who committed to watching it - we all love Star Wars - but this was bad. Really bad. So we decided to make it more bearable by drinking.

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And not just drinking anything, but the best of the best. We broke out high-end, barrel aged beers we had stashed in our cellars for years. We brought out some verticals (multi-year flights of different vintages of a given beer) and started other vintages. We had this juxtaposition of an abomination of what we love combined with the absolute best representations of what we love. And it worked. We made it through the whole thing. And we did it again the next year, with even more beer. The following year, another friend joined in. The year after that, a handful of friends joined in. Last year, we had viewing parties in two locations connected by video conference. It's either our brains giving up or us killing enough brain cells with booze, but it does get easier to watch with each viewing. 

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There is one saving grace to the show - there is an animated sequence where intergalactic bad-ass Boba Fett is introduced, on the moon orbiting a planet known as Panna. This beer is my tribute to that and any bizarre tradition that brings together friends and family together, even if it's just to drink and listen to Princess Leia sing a lyricized version of the Star Wars theme.

 

I wanted to design a beer that could age well for a decade or more that anyone could start a vertical of their own on. I looked to another one of my hobbies - making mead. I love honey and its wide variety of flavors. Braggot as a style is simply the blending of brewing beer and mead. This braggot in particular is about 2/3rds of a dark, rich, chocolatey ale and 1/3rd of a wildflower mead. This is a beer to let get warm and ponder over, sitting next to a warm fire, while watching wookies grunt at each other. 

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Cheers