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Monday night’s Weekly Pint was titled “Goodbye Halloween, Hello November,” and the night mostly lived up to the goodbye half. Halloween itself barely got a mention, which tells you something about how fast November arrives around here. What we did get was two Cincinnati goodbyes, one very good piece of news, a Sunday morning game plan that starts at breakfast, and a schnapps cuvée that I did not see coming. If you missed it live, here is the episode, and here is what actually happened on it.

Watch the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7y-0DaEUdE – The Weekly Pint streams live Mondays at 9:30 PM ET.

Second Sight Spirits: go this month, while you still can

Let me start with the one that matters most right now. Second Sight Spirits in Ludlow closes at the end of November. This is the month. If you have not been down there, either recently or ever, whatever your excuse has been, it is about to run out.

There are not a ton of distilleries here in Cincinnati, but there are a decent amount, and there is not another one with a personality like Second Sight’s. It is this perfect mix of something that makes sense for the owners, something that somehow makes sense for Ludlow, Kentucky, and something that separates it from everything else in the city. It works from a branding perspective. It works from a personality and a feeling perspective. Obviously it does not work as a business, or else they would not be closing, and sometimes that is just the way things happen.

So go. Stock up on some stuff. Show them some love. A place like this does not come around twice, and November is not going to wait for you.

Safi Wine Bar: one last Saturday

If Second Sight is the November goodbye, Safi is the this-week goodbye. Safi Wine Bar in Over-the-Rhine has its final day this Saturday, November 7. It is Jose Salazar’s original location, and no reason has been given for the closing.

I will be honest with you: I am not a wine guy. I have not been a wine guy. That is changing, hopefully, as I start exploring wine a little more, and that is part of why this one stings in a strange way. This is a spot that means a lot to a lot of people, and I probably should have checked it out before now. Now I have kind of lost that opportunity to experience it for the first time.

The new Salazar restaurant downtown recently opened, and I should not assume the wine bar is closing just because they are spread too thin. What we know is that it is closing, and we do not know what, if anything, comes next. If you are a wine drinker, Saturday is your last glass in that room. Take it.

The good news: MadTree’s CEO is an Enquirer Woman of the Year

After two goodbyes, here is a Cincinnati beer story that is just good news. Rhiannon Hoeweler, the first CEO of MadTree, has been named a 2026 Enquirer Woman of the Year, and that is a huge accomplishment.

What I love about MadTree right now is how well they seem to understand giving people a great experience in a taproom, and how they keep dialing that in better and better as time goes on. The taprooms were closed the other day, which stinks if you showed up thirsty, but they were closed because the staff was out volunteering and giving back to the community. That changes the conversation about a place, when they put their money where their mouth is.

I have been thinking about this since I started writing about beer, right around the time MadTree was opening. MadTree and Rhinegeist redefined what a taproom was in Cincinnati, and what craft beer was in Cincinnati. Before them, when you opened a brewery here, you had to pay some kind of respect to the German history of beer in the city. You had to make a helles or a dunkel or a hefeweizen. MadTree did not. They made overly hopped beers that were way higher in ABV than we were used to at the time, and they just kind of did their own thing.

For a while, MadTree was not part of the conversation when friends from out of town asked where they had to go, and none of the reasons by themselves were valid, but piled together they became valid. I do not think that is the case anymore. Now they are very high on that list for me, and it makes me feel good to be able to say I would send somebody from outside Cincinnati to MadTree. They deserve all of this, and so does everybody within the brewery.

So here is the question I put to chat, and I will put it to you too: who else in the Cincinnati beer community deserves some kind of honor like that? Who is having that kind of impact, not just on their company, but on the community around them? Send me your names.

Sunday morning: Bengals in Madrid, breakfast beer in Cincinnati

Now for the fun part. The Bengals play in Madrid on Sunday, November 8, and the game starts at 9:30 in the morning. That is early, even for us.

Covington just passed a temporary ordinance that will allow bars to open at 6:00 AM instead of the usual Sunday 9:00 AM. I looked, and on my first search I did not find any bars in Covington celebrating by opening at 6:00 AM, but if you want to go try to find a place open at 6:00 AM, I salute you. I am going to start drinking early, but I do not know that I am going to start at 6:00. I might wait until like 8:30.

Here is what I do know. Braxton is opening at least at 8:30, giving away hats in their taprooms to the first 100 guests. Rhinegeist is the official watch party of the Cincinnati Bengals, doors open again at 8:30, with a pre-game brunch (they have a food program now, I do not know if the brunch is just pizza, and I am okay with that), a ticket giveaway for the Steelers game, and a free koozie if you spend 60 bucks. That taproom has that big giant screen on the one wall, and that will be a fun place to watch the game.

Little Miami is opening early too, taproom at 9:00, but the kitchen does not open until 11:00. Look, great that they are opening early, but you have got to have some food rolling, especially at the beginning of the game, which is probably when we are going to be drinking the most. It is a therapy thing. And Gilligan’s has a good thing going on Sunday: opening at 9:00 AM, a breakfast stout release, and an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. Get yourself full of breakfast foods, watch an early game, drink a bunch of breakfast stout. What can go wrong?

Be smart about it. Make sure you have a driver if you are going out to watch the Bengals and drink at 9:00 AM.

The tastings: schnapps season, a South Carolina lager, and a cuvée

We opened the night the old school way, with the Schnappening. We are headed into fall, which means prime schnapp season. We are not to peppermint yet, we are a matter of weeks away from that, but in the meantime I needed something a little more fall-like, because Halloween is over and it is officially fall.

Zirbenz. If you have been listening for a while, you remember Zirbenz, a stone pine liqueur of the Alps, handcrafted in Austria by the Josef Hofer family distillery since 1797. It draws its flavor and natural red color from the freshly picked fruit of the Arolla Stone Pine, and it is exceptionally smooth, slightly sweet, with a crisp pine floral finish. It smells like the outdoors, not like sitting in the middle of a pine forest, and the pine flavor is sweet pine, not the kind of pine that screams Christmas to me. That is a perfect drink for today. To heck with pumpkin beers, although I did drink one yesterday.

Then a beer. This one is a gift from Marco, and I have been sitting on it for a while, so it is about six months old at this point. It is from Holiday Brewing in Inman, South Carolina, a 5.1% lager with Hallertau hops, crisp with a balanced malt background and a subtle bitterness. I am a firm believer that if you are going to make a lager and package it, that lager should be able to sit for a little while in a fridge and be okay, and this one held up just fine. Easy drinking, with some body to it, more of a premium lager you savor than a beer you crush all day watching football. I actually like that a lot.

Later we got to Third Eye and Jungle Jim’s in collaboration: Jungle Eye, a West Coast IPA. I have said this a bunch of times on this show, I do not understand what the term West Coast actually means. What I have learned is that it just means hop forward, and on this night my list, in importance, was: it has got to be clear, it has got to be bitter, and it has got to have some familiar American hop flavors. This one passed. Clear, hop forward, fruity tropical hops, bitter enough to accept. My one gripe with the collaboration series: if you are collaborating with Jungle Jim’s, a very big international market here in town, there should be some kind of strange ingredient in the beer. A fun fruit, something unique you can only get there. Not an ostrich burger. Do not put ostrich burgers in your beer.

And then, per Julia’s instructions, we made the cuvée. Both beers, plus a little bit of Zirbenz. This cuvée don’t play. It smells like schnapps and tastes like a stone pine fruit IPA, and that is a fun little journey.

Somewhere in between, I read Holiday Brewing’s one-star reviews live on Google, because that is the kind of show this is. A group that felt rushed out at 8:30 on a Saturday. A wedge salad that came out wrong twice, first with grilled chicken instead of fried, then with blue cheese dressing that was definitely not ranch. A waitress who may as well have been on roller skates. A reviewer who said no tip on the card because he planned to tip cash, and then found $10 on his card. The verdict stands: the beer is fine.

From chat: Columbus is getting hit hard

Chris brought up a Yellow Springs announcement for Columbus, and Julius brought up LandGrant buying Nocterra, and that turned into a real conversation. There is a lot of weird stuff happening in Columbus right now: a lot of consolidation, a lot of closures, a lot of adjustment. We could probably do an entire episode just about the chaos in Columbus.

What I will say is that it either makes me nervous or makes me relieved that it is not happening here, because it could, and it still might. So far, relatively speaking, Cincinnati has been pretty insulated from that. We have seen some closures and some consolidation, but not to this level. I feel like Cincinnati is a very different beer scene than Columbus, and there is a high chance we will not see that same thing here, but I have been wrong before. So the standard statement is always the same: get out there and support the places you love. If the place you love is a taproom that does not actually make beer in the city you live in, that is fine. If you love going to dive bars, go to a dive bar. Support what you love, and either it works or it does not, and sometimes it does not, and you have got to be ready for that too.

What’s coming

A few things from the end of the show. The Drinking With The Gnome rum episode is written, I still have to record it, maybe Thursday, and that is a show that is going to be happening frequently, hopefully. January is the launch of the magazine, it will be in hand in January, and I am really proud of this thing I have created. My hope is that by the third issue, I will be able to start getting other people’s articles in there, depending on advertisers, because I have got to get this thing making a little bit of money to pay people. And there is a really, really long newsletter going out this week that updates everybody on where I am at and how this whole thing fits together over the next six months or so.

In the meantime, get out there and vote on Tuesday. And get out there and drink something local. Drink something that you love.

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Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7y-0DaEUdE
More Cincinnati drinking news: thegnarlygnome.com
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The Weekly Pint streams live Mondays at 9:30 PM ET.