The Office Christmas Party, UK Edition, 11th Day of UK Christmas

My wife's office organized a Christmas party. Since her coworkers are almost as cool as she is, they decided to have the office party at Black Sheep Brewery in Masham. The party was on a Friday at lunchtime. Family members were welcome to attend since everyone was going Dutch (even though we are in the UK).

I drove with the kids to pick Mom up around 11:30. The drive to Masham was pleasant and we were among the first to arrive at the brewery.

We wandered around a little bit inside. In addition to a restaurant, they had a bar (naturally), the Black Sheep Shop, and the tour. The weather was far too cold to explore the beer garden.

Lucy enjoyed the roaring fire instead.

We did explore the toilets. Jacob and I were a little confused about the names on the doors: "tups" and "ewes." Luckily I knew what an ewe was and by process of elimination (pun intended) we wound up in the right loo. It was here that I first realized that some hand dryers could be turned off. In England, many electrical devices are connected to a wall switch that turns off the electricity to said devices. I flipped the switch and Jacob had no worries.

Back at the table, we discovered Christmas Crackers. , which I just blogged about here. These particular Christmas crackers had little games like tangrams or bowling inside. They also had paper crowns for us to wear. Jacob had a fun time putting several together to make a mega-cracker.

Trying to recreate the Big Bang

See Christmas crackers in action in our video.

Food and drinks were soon served. I ordered the Best Bitter cask ale, which is only available on tap and was quite delightful. For my first course, I had a duck salad appetizer. It was possibly the best salad I ever had for the simple reason that it was mostly meat--duck with ham and chicken and the occasional leaf of lettuce. It was very yummy.

The main course was some indifferently cooked turkey and potatoes. The side vegetables were nice. The best of all was the figgy pudding for dessert. It was very delicious and slathered in custard.

They brought me some figgy pudding and brought it out here

Read more about Christmas pudding in yesterpost.

After lunch was done we had a white elephant gift exchange. For those who don't know, here is how it works. Everyone brings a wrapped present. Random numbers are drawn and the person with number one opens any of the presents (presumably not their own). The person with the number two then can either take number one's present or open a new present. Person three can take either of the two opened presents or unwrap a new present. If person three takes a present from person one, person one may take person two's present or open an unwrapped one. A person can't immediately take a present back and an individual present can only change hands three times (at least the way we were playing). The gift swap makes for some chaos and for lots of fun. When our turn to get a present came around, we opened an e-reader/iPad stand that looks like a miniature deck chair. No one wanted to steal it from us. The popular stealing items were the bottles of liquor (two wines and one scotch, if I remember correctly). We never got into the swapping loop, which was probably good because Jacob didn't like that idea.

By the time the gift exchange was done, we missed the 2:00 p.m. brewery tour. Most people headed home but we walked around the town so we could come back for the 3:30 tour. By that point, the children were really tired. Lucy fell asleep as we walked back to the brewery. She slept through the video presentation on the brewery's history. Then the walking around part of the tour started. By this point, Jacob had also fallen asleep with his head on Mom's lap. I carefully transferred Lucy to Mom so I could attend the rest of the tour.

We went to see the main copper kettle where they boil and brew the initial batch of ale.

They had to take the roof off the building to get this inside!

They use a "gravity fed" system to brew their fabulous beers. The tour guide explained it well but I didn't retain too much. If you want to know more about the process, study this poster they had in the corner:

I should have put this on my Christmas wish list!

From here we walked over to the cask (that's "keg" to you American readers) processing area. Here they clean and sanitize old casks and fill them with new brew. The whole process takes only 15 minutes. Since our tour was on a Friday, we came after they had finished the quota of brewing for the week. We did not see the system in action.

Looks like a set from Laverne and Shirley

Even without workers that it looked very impressive. Unfortunately, Lucy had woken up and was not amenable to any soothing. I heard her from a distance and had to bail out on the tour. We had a long drive home so we stopped for some cookies from the local gas station (yes, I said "the" as in "apparently only one"). The drive wasn't so bad with a little food in our tummies. We may come back to Masham for the sheep festival in the Spring. While they're visiting the sheep, I'll finish the tour!

Photo Credit: Lindsey from work

If you are interested in the BBC The Office Christmas Specials with Ricky Gervais, look for info on those here.