Professor Good Ales

Walking into Black Abbey’s taproom feels a bit like walking into church. As you enter the door and pass through a Gothic arch, you’ll see hand-crafted wood tables and church pews. The eight taps on the far wall rest under a deep-red Gothic arch. The lights hanging from the ceiling used to illuminate a little church in East Tennessee. It feels like a sacred place. But as Martin Luther said, “It is better to think of church in the ale-house than to think of the ale-house in church.”

The taproom is open to the brew house, so you’ll see everything that goes into beer production. Congregants are separated from the brew house by rustic wooden beams and railings. The wood in the beams and tables was recovered from a storm-damaged tobacco barn. That wood spent a century working, now it gets to retire to a brewery. There are five eight-foot tables for beer lovers to gather around and discuss things like fermentation and sanctification.

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I’ve long considered myself a bit of a geek, but the genesis of this Stone Farking Wheaton W00t Stout is so geeky, it’s almost outstrips my ability to process its nerdiness.

The beer is a collaboration between Stone Brewing co-founder and beer geek supreme Greg Koch, child actor turned geek hero Wil Wheaton, and Drew Curtis, the web geek behind Fark.com, a news website fueled by cleverly rewritten headlines and Photoshop contests, like this recent one featuring a hairy couch.

The origins of Stone Farking Wheaton W00t Stout can be traced back to 2005, when Stone Brewing went to congratulate the 10,000th person to sign up for their mailing list, to find that it was the one and only Wil Wheaton, star of the ‘80s coming of age story “Stand By Me” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” where he played young Wesley Crusher.  A friendship between Wheaton and Koch followed, and the idea to brew together took root.

 

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How it all began… a nano brewery: Beetje Brewery. SOURCE. (Now known as The Commons Brewery.)