As much as we love the digital world where we work and play, we all appreciate holding paper in our hands, reading wha’ts printed on the pages.

Subscriptions to beer magazines make excellent presents. Beerbooks.com, our favorite independent beer bookstore, hasa nice range to choose from. And when you order a gift subscription, they’ll send the recipient a free Beer History Greeting Card. Not an e-card, but an actual printed, full-sized greeting card, sent by U.S. Mail.

This is starting to look like an unusually black Christmas to us (more about that during the shopping and drinking season).

Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee has brewed a beer it calls Black Friday and will sell it only on Nov. 23, day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Black Friday. It is a Black IPA.

Lakefront will sell it only at the 1872 N. Commerce St. It goes on sale at 8 a.m. It’s the second annual Black Friday event at Lakefront, with 12 hours of continuous brewery tours planned this year.

The first 300 people who buy the beer will get a limited Black Friday pint glass.

Ken Schram, author of The Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine from Your First Batch to Award-Winning Fruit and Herb Variations, writes: “My goal … is to begin bringing to meadmakers the breadth and depth of knowledge and resources that are available to beer brewers and winemakers. I sought to cover the many aspects of meadmaking in a comprehensive but easy-to-read fashion, and to provide readers with an understanding of the role quality ingredients play in creating a really pleasing mead.”

Lagunitas Brown Shugga’ has returned for the holidays.

Makes not mistake, Santa liked last year’s “replacement” beer, Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale, but he does appreciate a little Brown Shugga’ along with a cookie beside the fireplace.

You’ll recall that last year the brewery explained it would not make Brown Shugga’ because of production demands, and literally call Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale a Brown Shugga’ replacement.

Here’s the full story from last year:

This sad holiday season we didn’t have the brewing capacity to make our favorite seasonal brew, the widely feared BrownShugga’ Ale. You see, we had a couple of good years (thank you very much) and so heading into this season while we are awaiting a January delivery of a new brewhouse we are jammin’ along brewing 80 barrels of IPA and PILS and such every 3 hours. A couple of months back we realized that since we can only brew a mere 60 barrels of Shugga every 5 hours, that we were seriously screwed. For every case of Shugga’ brewed, we’d short 3 cases of our daily brews. The new brewhouse will help insure that this kind of failure never happens again. It’s a mess that we can not brew our BrownShugga’ this year and we suck for not doing it. There is nothing cool about screwing up this badly and we know it. Maybe we can sue our sorry selves. There is no joy in our hearts this holiday and the best we can hope for is a quick and merciful end. F*@& us. This totally blows. Whatever. We freaking munch moldy donkey butt and we just want it all to be over ….

Welcome back, Shugga’.