Celebrate MARDI GRAS @ IBW LODGE #1 Saturday, February 26th!

Greedings and salivations, my unusual friends...

Tomorrow starting at 4pm IBW LODGE #1 is going to do some space traveling down to the wonderful and strange Crescent City to celebrate Mardi Gras!

We'll be flush with fresh, delicious IBW beer and we'll have plenty of FREE FOOD to fill your swollen belly's. We've got boudin, muffulettas, king cake and other yummies. If you want to bring some treats to share, don't be shy! Come in costume and get your first beer on us! Here's the creepbook page for the event.

In other news....We dropped Magic Alex's Amazing Electric Granola Berry Beer this week and folks seem to be digging it. It tastes almost exactly like a 7% berry RX Bar. I do love it when a plan comes together. We've got it on tap here and in 4-packs to go at IBW LODGE #1 and you can find it at your favorite bottle shops in and around Chicago.

That's it for now. Any questions? Hit us up at info@ibw-chicago.com and we'll see you tomorrow!!

Vocoder Karaoke Thursday Night!!

Greetings from the End of the Bar...

Couple two, three reminders for you all for stuff coming up in the next few days:

THIS WEEKEND, Saturday, February 19th, starting at noon we'll be releasing the extremely rare and thoroughly delicious collaboration we did with Old Irving Brewing, ANCIENT MAGICK, that has been lovingly barrel aged in W.L. Weller barrels for almost 2 years.

This stuff is incredible, just so good. This 11% stout with peanut butter and marshmallow has relaxed into a black velvet and lace throne for the vanillins, oak and bourbon notes imparted from almost 2 years cozied up in wood. The IBW BEER CULT gets first dibs at the stash, but we'll release whatever allocations are left to you, the uninitiated, once they are done having their way with it.

If you don't want to wait and make sure that you get a slice of this deliciousness before the Cult is done with it, you can still JOIN OUR CULT and secure your dibs.

As you know, most cults have a bad reputation of usurping your will or your bank account or your ties to family members or normal society. Well, our little cult promises ALL of that and SO MUCH MORE!! You will not find a more efficiently bad-intentioned cult anywhere this side of the Manson/Nixon line. And we'll get you hammered. Just hit this link and get yourself signed up...

BARREL AGED ANCIENT MAGICK is packaged in 750ml bottles and will be available out of IBW LODGE #1 exclusively for $24.99 while supplies last. We open at noon on Saturdays. Again, this is NEXT SATURDAY February 19th.

And TOMORROW NIGHT!!! we've got VOCODER KARAOKE starting at 8:00pm. This is all the humiliating & exuberant shenanigan's you've come to know and love from karaoke with the added benefit of having the option to run your voice through the vocoder to make it sound like a robot.

We do this every third Thursday of the month and it's always a pretty hilarious time. We'll have Dagger Flute on special for $5 a pint and prizes for the folks that we deem to deserve them! Come on and shake your tail feather and show us what you goooooot.

Spoonful of Sugar is Back in 16oz Cans!

Greetings from the End of the Bar...

THE LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE OF DRY JANUARY IS FINALLY OVER!!!!

To properly capstone that tawdry villain, the Inner Order here at IBW Lodge #1 went down to the lake front on the new moon and set a pile of flaming Sears catalogues out to current into our lovely Lake Michigan. This symbolic Viking Funeral for that drooling, three-legged horse-hound demon-dog hyphenate born of the hollow notion that 4 weeks of sobriety is going to solve anything has, it is my hope (I've heard a lot of people talking about!), put that psychic pegboy to bed once and for good.

So let's get back to the business at hand, can we? And, of course, that business is the softening of the edges of this relentless meat wheel of time we've all seemed to have found one another upon. And the method is, yes, of course... beer.

SPOONFUL OF SUGAR is back in 16oz cans! This beautifus beastus is a Double Dry Hopped Double India Pale Ale with lactose sugar and galaxy hops. And, can I tell you? It's great. And it's out at stores and available on draft and in cans at IBW LODGE #1.

Alongside SPOONFUL OF SUGAR we also released, for the first time in 16oz cans, MR. MONK'S CREAM ALE. This homage to the patriarch of the Family Monk was such a huge hit on draft at the Lodge that we seeded it out into your wonderful and open mouths by way of aluminum cans. You can also find it on draft here at IBW LODGE #1 and at a few select draft accounts around the city. And, yes, it's in cans at all of your favorite bottle shops.

NEXT WEEKEND, Saturday, February 19th, starting at noon we'll be releasing the extremely rare and thoroughly delicious collaboration we did with Old Irving Brewing, ANCIENT MAGICK, that has been lovingly barrel aged in W.L. Weller barrels for almost 2 years.

This stuff is incredible, just so good. This 11% stout with peanut butter and marshmallow has relaxed into a black velvet and lace throne for the vanillins, oak and bourbon notes imparted from almost 2 years cozied up in wood. The IBW BEER CULT gets first dibs at the stash, but we'll release whatever allocations are left to you, the uninitiated, once they are done having their way with it.

If you don't want to wait and make sure that you get a slice of this deliciousness before the Cult is done with it, you can still JOIN OUR CULT and secure your dibs.

As you know, most cults have a bad reputation of usurping your will or your bank account or your ties to family members or normal society. Well, our little cult promises ALL of that and SO MUCH MORE!! You will not find a more efficiently bad-intentioned cult anywhere this side of the Manson/Nixon line. And we'll get you hammered. Just hit this link and get yourself signed up...

BARREL AGED ANCIENT MAGICK is packaged in 750ml bottles and will be available out of IBW LODGE #1 exclusively for $24.99 while supplies last. We open at noon on Saturdays. Again, this is NEXT SATURDAY February 19th.

The following Saturday, February 26, we'll be throwing a Mardi Gras party here at IBW LODGE #1. More details are coming on that in the next week, but, block out your weekend, we're gonna go hard to the hoop on that one.

FNORD on Firkin Friday + NOOKIE CONSTER MOSH stout

Earthly wishes of fortune and Joy to all of you bipedal creeps and cretins. We love you! We miss you! We strongly encourage you to STOP this great American scourge of 'Dry January' for the love of all that is unholy!

Seriously, DRY JANUARY? What kind of sick-o is willfully makes an effort to live in this world sober? What kind of perverse kink freak wants to view this careening marble of monkeys with dry eyes? And who can?

"Not you..." is my guess. Not you, dear friend. Let's stop the charades, let's end the pretending. In lieu of a "Dry January" might I suggest a "functional" lifestyle? Give it a thought. Put it in your blender. It mixes well with tequila and limes.

In service of our effort to support your honest navigation of this Foul Year of the Broken Word, 2022, we have a couple new offerings to help you numb the pain and excite your brain.

FNORD, our 7% American Wheat Ale, is back in the stacks after a couple years collecting it's thoughts. This delightful and deceptively boozy Wheat ale, is just the thing you need to scrape off the world from your nervous system. A simple beer with simple American hops, this beauty is actually a Beer and full of grains, yeasts, waters, hops and nothing else, just the way beer is supposed to be.

FNORD is hitting Chicago accounts today and Tuesday and then North, West & South burbs next week.

We've got 4-packs at the Lodge and we're tapping it tonight at opening along with a FNORD FIRKIN conditioned on pineapple, coconut, cherries and raspberries. The firkin will be available today through the weekend or until it's gone. These firkin Friday's are a new tradition we're going to be doing bi-weekly here in this The Year of the Poison Lizard, 2022.

Also, tapping today and available in 4-packs in the Lodge - and in the same cadence at bottle shops as FNORD - is a new stout that we've made with cocoa and "chocolate sandwich cookies" (as no one calls them except for people who don't want to get sued by Nabisco). NOOKIE CONSTER MOSH is 11% of our gooey base stout and the perfect beer to feed yourself on a lonely Friday night when the age old Ayurvedic trick of milk n' cookies just won't cut the mustard. And, let's be honest, the mustard is fuggin' hard, thick and a sickly shade of yellow these days, ain't it?

Speaking of cutting mustard and the word "mustard" and things that deceptively construct our realities that we take as much for granted as the air, the water, mustard and the socks we don day in and day out, I wanted to point your attention to William S. Burroughs theory of the cut-up. We used it on the label for NOOKIE CONSTER MOSH and offer a strong prescription for this method's application for any and all concerns of this world or of anything of a staid and stupid nature. When the world of your mind needs a nuclear douching, nothing does the trick like a run through The Cut-Up Machine.

Born of inspiration from the surrealists of the early 20th century and formalized by William S. Burroughs mentor and soul brother Brion Gysin, the basic idea is you take a text, any text, cut it up into individual words and rearrange them at random. What results is a kind of post-modern divination that can, at turns, be funny, confounding and chillingly prescient. What this method says about the human mind is far more interesting than your superstitious knee-jerk reaction to the word "divination" and far more subversive.

If you want to take a shot at this, take your latest poem, song, love letter or divorce filings and stick them in this handy, dandy on-line CUT-UP GENERATOR. Read through it, I mean really read through it and, well, learn to Trust nonsense. David Bowie used this technique through out his career on some of his best songs. And, let's be Honest Abe's here for a minute: if it was good enough for Bowie, it's more than ok for you or me.

Oh! Have you JOINED OUR CULT yet? Most cults have a bad reputation of usurping your will or your bank account or your ties to family members or normal society. Well, our little cult promises ALL of that and SO MUCH MORE!! You will not find a more efficiently bad-intentioned cult anywhere this side of the Manson/Nixon line. And we'll get you hammered. Just hit this link and get yourself signed up...

No Shining Party Tonight for NYE, but IBW LODGE #1 Is Still Open

After a lot of back and forth, we're going to temporarily pull the plug on our NYE @ The Overlook Hotel party tonight. We'll still be open & still have a countdown, but we're going to put the Shining party on ice until we have more staff and can do it right.

I don't know if you've heard or not, but this omicron thing is all over the place. We've lost staff due to this surge already and we've had to make scheduling changes to insure we limit the exposure of too many of our staff at the same time.

If you know anything about us then you probably know there's 9 of us on staff here on a rainy day. Now, I'm not sure if you believe in math and all of it's diabolical implications, but, with 9 people total staff, if 2 get sick, that is over 20% of our staff out. And, depending on who those 2 people are, that can quite literally bring us to a hault. Luckily, we're not at a hault right now, we're just doing our bloody best to avoid that hault from happening.

So... sorry, but we'll do the Shining party later in the year when we can do it and enjoy it properly.

We'll still be open from 4pm until 2am today, so we hope you still swing by and enjoy some beer, a countdown at midnight and, as always, our normal Friday Night Fight Club that we hold in the basement every week.The password this week is: Fidelio.

One thing that would really help us as we're certain to take a hit over the next few weeks is for you to buy some beer. So, even if you're not going out tonight, maybe you could swing by IBW Lodge #1 and grab a couple 4-packs for your at-home-game NYE event?

Here's our newest additions to your options:

RADIONIC AMPLIFIER - 8.5% Brut IPA with Citra, Mosaic & Huell Melon. Remember that one summer, long ago when everybody made a brut IPA? We barely do either, but ours was considered by some to be the best of the style in Chicago. Here it is back amongst us just in time for NYE. Imagine a beer, effervescent and dry but rich with hop character and you're almost to RADIONIC AMPLIFIER.

THE RETURN OF SLUSHY THING - For all of you vegan, lactose intolerant, dairy free people who hate beer... this is just the thing for you. Our 4th slushy offering, THE RETURN OF SLUSHY THING, is a 6% seltzer with blackberry, blueberry & mint. Almost 30% of this seltzer is fruit. So, if that is something you want out of a brewery... there you go.

PAZUZU'S PEDALS - Back by popular demand, our Porter is back to terrorize your liver while tantalizing your tongue.

All of these are available today at IBW LODGE #1 in 4-packs and everything is on draft right now, except for the slushy. As soon as CANDY CANE WAR ON XMAS pops, we'll put on Slushy Thing.

Oh! Have you JOINED OUR CULT yet? Most cults have a bad reputation of usurping your will or your bank account or your ties to family members or normal society. Well, our little cult promises ALL of that and SO MUCH MORE!! You will not find a more efficiently bad-intentioned cult anywhere this side of the Manson/Nixon line. And we'll get you hammered. Just hit this link and get yourself signed up...

Also, we're going to be closed January 1st. We will be open on Sunday, January 2nd though, so come on by, get away from the family and hang out with Brogan.

Any questions? Hit us up at info@ibw-chicago.com