Beer for Halloween

Whether you call it Halloween, All Saints and Souls Days, Samhain, or Día de los Muertos - it's a strange amalgam of carnival and loss. Take a moment to toast the good times and the dead and haunted in the next couple of days. Life is fragile and fleeting.

Here's a Halloween poem.

All Souls' Night, 1917
by Hortense King Flexner

You heap the logs and try to fill
The little room with words and cheer,
But silent feet are on the hill,
Across the window veiled eyes peer.
The hosts of lovers, young in death,
Go seeking down the world to-night,
Remembering faces, warmth and breath—
And they shall seek till it is light.
Then let the white-flaked logs burn low,
Lest those who drift before the storm
See gladness on our hearth and know
There is no flame can make them warm.

For the fun, don't let your Halloween Hangover stop you. Toast the Day of the Dead with an Abominable Winter Ale at the Taphouse.

The Hopworks Urban Brewery (HUB) party is coming to the Taphouse November 1st with special guest brewer Jaime Rodriguez. This party will be staring later in the evening than previous parties and will run 7:30 to close.

We’ll have HUB swag to give away. A six HUB beer taster tray for $7. We’ll be running happy hour prices on all HUB draft beers through closing. Free HUB glass with your first HUB purchase while supplies last, one per customer please.

Draft beers will be: Batch 1000 ESB Anniversary Ale, HUB Lager, Abominable Winter Ale and Seven Grain Stout. HUB focuses on Organic beers that are produced in their environmentally friendly brewery in Portland.

And since it's not all fun-and-games, think about the lost, especially those lost deep in the institutions of Salem.

As the Prison and Courts grapple with a Capital Case even today, consider all those executed, some of them quite possibly innocent. But whether guilty or not, there's a long, long trail of loss and sadness.

And consider those alone who, without family by their side in dying, and without family after death, still endure the lonely cannister.