- If you look carefully over to the right, you can see the line where I gave up dusting this table.
I haven’t written about a Local Option beer in more than a year, but not because they haven’t rolled out anything new. The saison Walk ov Shame debuted on draft in November, and a second batch, split between kegs and 500-milliliter bottles, started shipping about a month ago. And a bottled beer is a beer I can review at home. (Another new Option beer, Exorcist!, should be on shelves within the month; in November I said it “might be the hoppiest stout I’ve ever tasted.”)
The Local Option folks are gypsy brewers, and right now they’re exclusively using the equipment at Pub Dog in Maryland—their other regular partners, Dark Horse and Against the Grain, can’t spare the capacity due to ongoing construction and renovation projects. In fact 60 to 70 percent of Pub Dog’s annual output consists of LO beers—the brewery benefits from the premium prices the Option can command (as compared to those for its own products). That said, Russomanno is having trouble keeping up with the demand for Local Option beers, and he’s looking for new host breweries to help.
Sweet Leif has a skull head because when he was a kid his parents took him to a Meshuggah show, where the extreme metal literally ripped his face off. His folks, presumably unnerved by his new look, gave him up to a convent to be raised by nuns. That upbringing (and a youthful exorcism, the details of which I didn’t quite follow) have given Sweet Leif a kind of immunity to the depredations of corrupt clergymen. Hence the image here: the priest has attempted to have his sinful way with our hero, only to have the tables turned. The less of the ensuing scene you try to picture, the better off you’ll be.
Doom split up in 2000 but reunited last year, with Fujita as the only original member still aboard. There’s no new material yet as far as I can tell, but for obvious reasons this is a hard band to Google.
