It's the holiday season, and Shade Tree would like to celebrate by exchanging gifts with you. What do you get? A chance to finally try the beer we've been talking so much about, and for free! What do we ask for in return? Your generosity to our fundraiser!

On Saturday the 10th, we'll be bringing 20 gallons of the Divining Ale (a Kölsch-style hybrid) and another 20 of the Well Digger Double (an Imperial IPA) to the Niche Wine Lounge (http://www.nichenc.com/); an uber-cool wine bar in the heart of Holly Springs. In addition to free Shade Tree beer, the town of Holly Springs will have a Holiday Parade that morning. That evening Niche will be hosting live music, and offers a fantastic selection of wine and craft beer you can purchase when the Shade Tree brews run dry.

The fundraiser will take place via a Kickstarter.com campaign, and the URL for our project will be available soon. How much should you donate? There's no set amount, feel free to give whatever you feel is appropriate. And keep in mind that--through Kickstarter--you don't just give away your money to Shade Tree. Instead, donations are made in tiers, and each tier has a set of rewards. If Shade Tree doesn't reach its goal, your donation is cancelled and you get to keep your cash. If we *do* reach our goal, we get the donation, but you get the rewards associated with each of the tiers to which you donated.

So come and try the beer. Enjoy the music and have fun. And above all, help us plant the Shade Tree!

Well, the Day of Days has come again. This Friday we will be attempting 20 gallons, across two brews. We will start our morning at 8am, brewing ten gallons of our Divining Ale, the Kölsch-style hybrid. This will be followed by ten gallons of the Well Digger Double, our Imperial IPA.

Insanity, you say? Yes!

Impossible, you say? Only for lesser brewers!

Will we succeed, you ask? It better! Because we have very specific plans for the resulting beer, and those plans directly involve you. That's right, this beer has your name on it, but we can't tell you why just yet. Keep your eyes peeled, and we'll give you some details a little later on.

The Brewhouse: The brewhouse is mostly built, mostly from profanity and scabs as Andrew and David Forrest Gumped their way through the construction process. It features slots for our hot liquor tank, mash lauter tun, and kettle, complete with a tippy-dump (yes, that's an official term) which will most certainly result in a grievous injury the first time we use it. We hope to incorporate into the brewhouse a HERMS to more accurately maintain our mashing temps, but I'm sure that means jibberdy garble to most of you non-brewers out there.

The Pumps: Oh, the pumps, the pumps. What a journey THEY have been. We started by building Frankenpump, which is beautiful in it's complexity. It incorporates a belt and pulley transmission coupled with three peristaltic pump heads, driven by an electric motor. I should point out that this pump was conceived, designed, and built entirely from scratch by David and Andrew. That means it's virtually impossible for this thing not to make OSHA workers wake up screaming at night. Of course, once we finally got this thing to stop its killing sprees and actually start pumping water, we lucked into a stainless steel diaphragm pump that can basically swim circles around the Frankenpump. But I guess there's no harm in having two, right?

The drums: We're constructing our tank, tun, and kettle from 55 gallon stainless steel drums. These will be ported with extraction fittings and sight glasses to make the operation look nifty and more mad-scientist-ish. Other than that, they're just drums, people. There's not much more I can say about them. Quit nagging.

Captain Hook: We lucked our way into a 12x12 walk in cooler that, once erected it will be used as a two-temp controlled fermatation chamber. Though we have not yet purchased fermentors, we have them picked out. We're waiting on Santa to respond to our letters. Oh, why do we call it Captain Hook? As Dan Varga will be happy to point out, taking this beast apart was a task of Herculean proportions, requiring the unlatching of a series of locking hooks. And by "series" I mean somewhere between two and three hundred. Thousand. And by "locking hooks" I mean "sharp metal appendages hidden within the walls, waiting for you to let your guard down, and then pouncing."

Other stuff: We've bought some other stuff, too, like hoses, plate chillers, female escorts (if you're from the government, ignore that). Those just aren't quite as interesting to talk about. Except the escorts, but we're legally bound to leave that part up to your imagination.

And the $64,000 question: Where in the name of Zeus are we planning to do all this? Yeah, uh, we'll let you know. The truth is, we've had a lot of interest from a lot of different businesses who were willing to entertain the idea of partnering up, but in every case we've run into some preventative factor. In one case it was zoning. In many other ones it was a matter of space or utility availability. In one case it was a matter of finding out that the owner was bat-sh*t crazy (apparently "become my partner" to him sounded like "buy my building".) But fear not, location is priority numero uno, right now. In fact, this very day we're meeting with some nice young gentlemen with Italian sounding names. They keep saying something about "payments" and "broken legs", but we're pretty sure that's just slang for "business opportunity" and "mutually beneficial partnering relationships". Actually, we really do have a very exciting meeting today with the owners of a Carrboro restaurant. I can't make any promises that they'll like us, but let's keep our fingers crossed!