The Misquah Pilot-Independent

MISQUAH — The knot did not give. Jonas Holt, who tied it himself from the inside in July and who has spent three weeks being asked about it by strangers, pulled twice at two o’clock Saturday from the top of a stepladder while something over three hundred people stood in the street and watched a man fail to untie his own rope. On the second pull, the crowd made a sound. On the third, Walt Sorensen came through the front of it holding a pocketknife, handle first, and said the only thing that needed saying, which was: “Told you. Most days.” At four minutes past two the canvas came down in one piece, and the sign underneath said, in plain black letters on cream, MUD LAKE BREWING CO. There was a beat of silence — the specific silence of three hundred people rearranging an expectation — and then, from somewhere near the back, a single voice that everyone present identified immediately as Dorothy Knutson, president of the Mud Lake Association, saying, “Well,” in a tone this newspaper is not equipped to transcribe. What followed was the largest sustained noise heard on Second Avenue since the Fourth, and it went on long enough that Annika Holt, standing in the doorway of her own business, had to wait to be heard. “We knew it would either land or it wouldn’t,” she said, later, when the room had thinned to a comfortable seventy and the taps had been going for two hours. “It landed.” The flagship, poured for the first time at 2:20 p.m. to a line that reached past the alley, is Mud Lake Amber — copper, medium-bodied, faintly sweet, and, in the assessment of the retired postmaster who has been evaluating things at length since 1994, “better than the lake it’s named for, which is not an insult to either one.” It is joined by Second Creamery Pale and by Year Fourteen Stout, whose name required no explanation to anybody in the building and from which the Holts have committed a dollar a pint to the First Lutheran basement roof fund, in perpetuity or until the roof is finished, “whichever the congregation would like to bet on.”