Greetings, foul friends!
It’s been a busy month for us, moving a menagerie of distilling equipment, bottles, ingredients, demons, ghosts, and other unspeakable things into the new distillery. As any of you who have moved home will know, it’s not a task you’d wish on your worst enemy while it’s going on, but once you’re in the new place and settled, it’s completely worth it…
Greetings, foul friends!
Can we start this month’s entry with a bit of a moan? Normally, we’d leave that to The Wailing Warblers, the Lodge’s resident band of ghosts, but they’re currently on tour in Europe (speak to your local mausoleum for tickets).
Greetings, foul friends!
May we be the first of the undead to wish you a Happy New Year. We hope you rang in the new year merry, happy, and consuming our award-winning small batch gin.
What did we do for New Year, you ask?…
Greetings, foul friends!
The end of the year fast approacheth. Very soon, people across the land will be encouraging a fat man to break into their homes, eat their food, drink their alcohol, and then leave without so much as a thank you.
Greetings, foul friends!
No sooner have the Halloween embers petered out than we’re lighting new fires to celebrate Guido Fawkes being hung, drawn, and quartered over 400 years ago.
Oh, how we love this quaint little country of yours!
Greetings, foul friends!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! We realise that you humans usually associate that phrase with Christmas, but we fail to see what could be more wonderful than inclement weather, chilly mornings, dark nights and a higher-than-average chance of being attacked by a werewolf.
Glorious!
Greetings, foul friends!
Somehow, we’re halfway through your human calendar year already. Of course, that’s just the blink of an eye to immortals like us, but Madame Anathema has been encouraging us to integrate more with our human customers, so we’ve been practising saying things like, “Ooh, where has this year gone?!”
Cousin Vlad, in particular, was very excited to learn about your World Blood Donor Day happening on the 24th of this month, but we think he may have gotten the wrong end of the stake.
We’re a work in progress, friends!
Speaking of which, here are some dates for your human diary:
DIARY DATES
The King’s Birthday (17th) – Uncle Viggo the Carpathian has been very grumpy that His Majesty’s latest official portraiture seems to have copied his own, but that won’t stop us from toasting HRHs’ health with an award-winning gin or two.
Midsummer (20th) – More good news! The summer solstice occurs on the 20th of this month and marks midsummer: the ‘longest day’ and ‘shortest night’ of the year. We’ll be heading to Stonehenge to catch up with some druid friends we haven’t seen for a few thousand years, and celebrating the fact that ‘the nights are drawing in’ and it’ll soon be ‘black as pitch’ at nights again very soon (how did we do with the human terminology?).
World UFO Day (24th) – Our space brethren hold a very special place in our undead hearts (read more about that below), so it gives us huge pleasure to celebrate with them on the 24th of June. This is the date that reporter Kenneth Arnold wrote about what is generally considered to be the first widely reported UFO in the United States. July 2nd is also the date of the ‘supposed’ UFO crash in the 1947 Roswell incident, so don your tin foil hats in appreciation (the aliens think it’s hilarious and send photos back home to their families).
UEFA EUROS 2024
We confess that this human obsession makes us scratch our heads a little. From what we can gather, 22 people try to kick a bag of wind into a big net for 90 minutes, fall over a lot, and grab their ankles like an imp has taken a bite out of them only to get up and run it off 20 seconds later – and you can’t get enough of it?
In the spirit of trying to understand, we recreated a game in the cemetery at the back of The Black Lodge, but the sheep’s stomach we used for a ball kept bursting, and the imps refused to let go of our ankles once they’d latched on, so we were all hobbling around the distillery for weeks. Never again!
Still, we don’t deny you your petty little pastimes – sorry, love of the beautiful game – and we understand that many of you like to consume vast amounts of alcohol and climb lampposts after the game. We encourage you to enjoy our premium craft gin throughout the game, but please do so responsibly.
GIN OF THE MONTH
This month, we’re giving you a peak behind the curtain at the development of one of our most popular concoctions; Our dark cherry, chilli chocolate gin.
The origins of this particular elixir might surprise you. We’re all big fans of your TV show Twin Peaks here at The Black Lodge, so we wanted to create a drink that paid homage to the cherry pie they often serve at the Double R Diner. We infused the savoury notes of chillies, then added luxurious chocolate to smooth out the overall flavour.
What you’re left with is a drink profile that’s:
Nose
Deep, rich plummy fruit and decadent chocolate aromas
Palate
A complex marriage of bittersweet cherry and indulgent dark chocolate, complimented by the creeping heat of chilli
Finish
Covers the palate with velvety smooth, warming, cocoa-infused spices
Delicious!
COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH
And if that’s got your lips smacking and your mouth watering, try our Cherry Bakewell Tart-inspired cocktail:
Enjoy!
UNTIL NEXT TIME…
That’s it for another Black Lodge journal entry, mortals. Madame Anathema is searching for us to give the next human lecture – something about a popular event coming up next month where two of you take it in turns to hit a small ball over a net – but we’re all in hiding.
You humans are weird and we want no part of it. You have your ways, and we’ll have ours.
Expect us to be back to our old venomous selves again next month.
Farewell, worms! (Oooh, that felt good!)
Stay spooky,
Brother G and Brother T
