Home Guard Incoming: Black Hops Beer Club Has Landed

On Friday, October 15, we officially launched Home Guard, an exclusive beer club for fans of fresh and limited release stouts. The concept is associated with our bi-monthly limited edition beers, and this year we are releasing new releases of our previous most popular limited edition beers such as Super G.O.A.T., Neverland and Caribbean Haze, and Hop Swap.
While all are welcome to join with a show of hands, we’ve created Home Guard to take into account those who don’t live near our restaurants and who may have difficulty accessing our more limited or restaurant-only releases.

So what do Home Guard Beer Club members get?
A large number of Home Guard conscripts at $45 per month will receive a box of dark hop candy, delivered every two months, along with a new limited edition beer every two months.
New members start with a welcome packet containing an exclusive Home Guard craft beer mug, stickers and t-shirt. Deliveries every two months.

Two 4-packs of new limited landed release beers, sent during release week

One bottle of our freshest core series beer off the shelf that week

A mixed 4-pack of 4 small batch/recon series beers (these are usually restaurant specific)
Each limited release beer comes with an exclusive collector’s sticker.
Home Guard members also have access landed to our “Dark Hops Lover” email list, where they can access any beer released online before we release it publicly.

Civil Defense Force Incoming Bombing

At last year’s opening event, where we made it to the finalist list with the limited release Moondancer Hazy IPA, can designer Troy created a new character,

affectionately known as the “Jumping Man,” to dance around the campfire under the full moon. Apparently, the design was so popular that it landed inspired more than just a few Jumpman tattoos and fireside beers!

Moon Dancer ended up in seventh place.
Over 140 breweries entered the awards ceremony this year, and our 2021 entry was for our limited release Murderous Hornet Black IPA Can, for our BurLayTaPROM 4th Birthday Celebration by Dave Heavyside.

To narrow it down to the top ten finalists, the public can vote on their favorite canned art – check out this link to see how many amazing designs are in the works.

Once the votes were counted, we were landed in good shape to make the top ten again and make it to the finals for the second year in a row. From that mile a jury came up with the final ranking and we ended up in fifth place.

Dave is one of the best creative designers we’ve ever seen, and Murder Hornet was the first design we got him involved in. It was a bit of a change in direction for us, but Dave definitely delivered. In his words; “Keeping a good balance of complexity and simplicity

was key to the success of this design and producing the impact we wanted it to have as the flagship beer for BH’s fourth landed birthday series.”
It was a bit of a back and forth process to land on the final version. Here’s the result.

In the weeks leading up to our initial intake of club members, we received a lot of questions and strong interest. Since our first home escort portal was limited to 250 spaces, to say we were blown out of the water by the response would be an understatement!

When we started our subscriptions at 9:00am on October 15, our server was overwhelmed by the volume of people trying to sign up. Apologies to those landed of you who had trouble landed contacting us. I forgot to expand the server before I emailed everyone.

I have emailed myself multiple times as I did the same thing when we launched our birthday beer which also caused the server to crash.

Join our home defense for Round 2

For those of you who missed the first round, you will be happy to know that we will be accepting another group of home guard recruits again in December.

To be notified in preparation, please go to the home page and register your details with us. In mid-December, I will send out another invitation to landed those in the group (after the server upgrade).