The latest Flying Dog sample package

The title says it all: the latest sample package from Flying Dog came today. What I like about Flying Dog—aside from receiving beer from them—is that they’re proactive and embracing the grassroots nature of the web and blogs and technology. Reaching out to bloggers, being active on Flickr and Twitter and MySpace and such, launching (and brewing) their own open source beer project—all things which are really, really smart, and doing things that no other brewery (that I know of) is doing. Pioneering.

(The only ding I’d give them offhand is their heavy use of Flash on their website. I pretty much hate Flash-based navigation. It breaks things.)

Anyway, this latest sample package consists of three beers: the open source beer, Collaborator Doppelbock; Wild Dog Barrel-Aged Horn Dog; and K-9 Cruiser Winter Ale. The Collaborator and Horn Dog I’m particularly interested in, the first because of the open source project thing (naturally), and the Horn Dog because as they write:

This is a completely experimental beer. We took our Horn Dog Barley Wine and aged it in used Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey barrels for 13 months to give us a Barley Wine with a very distinctive flavor.

I’m loving the whole barrel-aging movement, so this sounds exciting to me.

I’ll write up the reviews as I drink.