Woods Boss is a brewery I’ve been going to since pretty much day one. I met Jordan, one of the owners, somewhat at random a few months before they finished their buildout, became somewhat friendly with him, and followed their progress through their opening, and have been tripping down there on occasion ever since.
And then came the pandemic, and the huge industry shift to packaging. Many breweries (including Woods Boss) wasn’t even messing with canning before this point, but it became a survival mechanism for a lot of breweries. And as with most breweries who weren’t already packaging, Woods Boss had no canning line, so they’ve been contracting with a couple of mobile canning services in the area; these folks roll over with a big box truck, unload an entire canning line (sometimes including a depalletizer!) and all the supplies (pallet of cans, boxes of PakTek cappers, bundles of case flats), set it up, can beer for hours, clean, break everything down, put it back in the truck, and they’re gone. It’s a great option for smaller breweries who don’t have the budget to purchase and install their own equipment.
With a largely manual setup, packaging days require some extra hands; many breweries rely on volunteer labor to fill in the gaps, and Woods Boss is no exception. They’ve got no shortage of willing souls, but of late, I’m one of the folks they’ve reached out to on the regular to come help out with their generally monthly packaging days.
It’s why I was down there last month, and how I came to be sitting outside with Jordan while he’s getting interviewed by Ken and April Pishna for their podcast, filming the interview with my phone, when a dump truck with a raised bed rolled up the street and took out some power lines and poles, cutting power to the area blocks around.
Events like these often inspire humorous responses; this debacle was no exception. Nearly immedately, there was a plan to brew a beer to commemorate the event, and an informal contest on Facebook to come up with a name for this beer. The name they settled on was “What the Truck?”, a double IPA, and it was in the lineup that we canned a few days ago.
Of course, I told Jordan from the get-go that I wanted in on that canning day.
Other tasty, tasty beverages canned that day was “Coloryland”, a hazy double IPA collab with a pair of breweries from Maryland (1623 and True Respite); one of principals of 1623, Zac Rissmiller, actually lives here in Denver and chips in at Woods Boss on occasion; “Hisolda”, one of their semi-regular offerings, an Irish coffee cream stout (yum!), “Czech Dam”, a Czech pilsner, and “Foothills Fire”, a red ale that Woods Boss brews regularly, a portion of the profits of which are donated to wildland firefighting efforts.
It
was an unusually long canning day; nine and a half hours! Five batches, over a hundred cases of most everything. Even with a nice fast line cranking out around two cases worth of cans a minute, there’s still delays here and there. So, plenty of time for my jeans to suffer a catastrophic failure, much to the amusement of pretty much everyone else in attendance. A gaping hole over my backside, combined with copious amounts of fresh beer being consumed by folks present, was a formula for mild borderline sexual harassment in the form of fingers poking my buttcheek here and there, hah!
I’m just thankful I wasn’t going commando that day.
Rest in peace, favorite pair of jeans; you served me long and well.