10/15/2026
This post is about the end, but let’s also talk about the beginning.
It’s not the earliest photograph, but the earliest photograph we can find tonight is from about 2011. It’s a photograph of just the three of us. It’s before Covid, before Rock Lititz, before Ice Avenue, before the CSA. It’s before we built the bar, before we bought the records, before Pennsylvania changed the way licenses work, before everyone stopped drinking b**r, before sours were the new IPAS (which were then replaced by IPAs, which were then replaced by Guys Who Just Love La**rs or whatever).
Back then, the best place to find b**r you couldn’t find anywhere in Lancaster was at Crush. And it was in a refrigerator owned by Tim Carr, and that refrigerator was curated by Aaron Risser.
Back then, it was Belgian tripels, and bomber bottles of saisons, and every now and then maybe a bottle of Pliny the Elder, and long conversations about This Other Guy Who Had Pliny the Younger and this place called Russian River Brewing Company.
Back then, it was rumors of one bottle of Westvleteren 12 at This Other Guy’s House, and 45 minute stories about the ways the monks would only let you buy, like, a thimble of Westvleteren 12 and only if you came on the only Tuesday of the year when they had it on sale and the only way to know what Tuesday was to move to Belgium and wait for the right carrier pigeon.
The point is: we’re old.
The point is: there’s a time all three of us miss more than we talk about. When it was just the three of us – Aaron Risser, and Mike Simpson, and Brandon Stetser – sitting in Aaron’s kitchen. Mike and Brandon listening to Aaron talk about craft b**r, Mike and Brandon making spelt jokes, Mike and Aaron and Brandon making milk glue and hand gluing paper labels to recycled b**r bottles that we had mouth-emptied and hand-washed to see if we could make a b**r of our own.
The three of us thinking: this is like being in a band.
The three of us thinking: maybe we’re the band that could make it big.
Between that day and today everything in the world has happened and everything in the world changed, too. The world is so different. We are so different. We started a CSA, we started a brewery, we argued all the time, we started other businesses, we married, we kept arguing, we moved to Lititz, we had kids, we hired people, we grew up.
We grew apart.
And now: we’re ready to say thank you, and let go.
It was just the three of us, and we thought it would last forever, and today – tonight, whatever – we know that it will only last another 17 days. We hope you’ll let us tell you a few stories over the next two weeks or so, and we hope you’ll help us celebrate the end of this story, too.
Because this one is going to end forever on October 31st, when we close our doors for the final time.
