So now that we have more staff than we see at family dinners, it seemed like a good time to do a monthly "all staff" meeting. Oh, how we've grown! I missed the first one at the end of Semptember, but I did get caught up on the two most important items on the agenda:
1) No staff use of the store bathroom during store hours. We all really stink. Some more than others.
2) At every staff meeting on the last Friday of each month (cause that's when we are always not so busy, right? :) a selected Beau's employee gets to design and brew under Matt and Alex's watch a mini-batch of beer of his or her choice during the day and meeting. At every subsequent meeting, all attendees get to sample last month's month's batch, and cheer for the new one on the go.
Item #1 has inconvenienced me once or twice, but item #2--oh yeah! In September, Laura got to brew first, and decided to do a pumpkin ale, since it would be ready on Halloween. No synthetic pumpkin flavour at Beau's... Laura chucked the whole gourd in, and then fished out the chunks. Since that was the meeting I missed (clever, hmmm, that was the one with no homebrew) no one was more surprised than I was to walk into my house all filled with pumpkinny goodness. Driven either by environmental passion to re-use, or a mega-addition to pie, Laura capped her brew day by pieing the pumpkin that went into the brew. Yahoo!
And then the moment of truthiness, when we got to sample the Pumpkin Ale in between Steve rambling off 50 million events we are part of in the next month ("we have the bodies, so it shouldn't be a problem"... famous last words), giving an update on how we are preparing for a Christmas spike in sales ("if we run dry, run, RUN for your lives!!!"), etc. It was received to rave reviews, and Steve, who says he rarely "Pumps" twice, went for a second round of Pumping.
Up next month will be Phil's oyster stout, an oyster infused brew with a $200 price tag in oysters alone... pop by on the 28th of November and see if it blows you down, matey.
Cheers! Jen