Photo by Jay Paul
To anyone who has perfected the party trick known as the Irish goodbye, I salute you. It seems simple enough, to slip away and avoid a prolonged farewell. But an Irish goodbye — or ghosting — is awkward if you get busted. Tony Ammendolia knows this, and as owner and brewer at Final Gravity Brewing Co. he named a beer after the move.
Ammendolia was leaving a homebrewers’ get-together when his maltster from Wood’s Mill Malt House called him out. “He was like, ‘Hey! An Irish goodbye!’ and I was confused,” Ammendolia said. “But once he explained it, I [realized I] do it all the time.”
And Final Gravity’s Irish Goodbye was born. A foreign extra stout made with Virginia-grown malted barley (from Wood’s Mill, of course), it’s a notch down from an imperial stout with notes of chocolate and coffee. Plus, it won the silver medal for Irish stouts in the 2016 Virginia Craft Brewers Cup.
Take a growler to your next party, and your host won’t even care if you ghost them.
