• Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

There are plenty of made up occasions and pseudo-holidays, but blog-for-smart-people The Awl are celebrating the third year of one of the finest of the mostly-imaginary celebrations: Duck Out for a Drink Day.

Participating is easy: Leave work early. Go get a drink. That's about it.

From The Awl:

You work hard, you don't call attention to yourself, and you give it as much of yourself as you have. You, in short, deserve some kind of prize. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works. But there is one day a year where your toil is acknowledged, however briefly. That's right: the Founding Fathers, in George Washington's famous "Fuck This Shit" section of The Federalist Papers (later withdrawn due to a great deal of internecine dispute which we do not have the space to get into here), established August 25th as "the day upon which the noble worker shall sneake off to quickly imbibe whilft in the midft of his labors," or, as it has come to be known, National Duck Out For A Drink Day. The 25th falls on a Sunday this year, meaning that today's the day we observe the holiday in which you take time for yourself to sneak out to a nearby tavern and knock back a couple beers, slam a few shots, or, depending on how long you think you can linger, treat yourself to a few jumbo cocktails. Be sure to bring a couple co-workers with you: National Duck Out For A Drink Day is even more enjoyable if you think about it as a team-building exercise that you've put together on your own, where the only "trust falls" are actual stumbles. Remember, if you're out at the bar during work hours it's like they're paying you to drink! Go do us proud, workers of America! (Unless your job involves creating some kind of syphilis vaccine, in which case what you're doing is way too important for you to take even a moment away from it.)

• Arizona Craft Brewers Guild

Heroes 19, as we wrote about last month, was set in motion as a fundraiser for the families of the Granite Mountain Hotshots who died fighting the Yarnell Hill wildfire. Yes, we've noted a few places and occasions at and with which to pick up a pint or two of the brown ale, but when there's an opportunity to drink to charity, we see no reason to pass it by.

Tap & Bottle closes up at 11 p.m. tonight. For more on Heroes 19, including where to pick it up on the chance that T&B has run out of it by the time you swing by there, the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild has information.

• Look! We're not covered up by the logo now!

Thanks to you, Tucson Weekly readers (and maybe some other people too, but I doubt it), Tap & Bottle made the finals of CraftBeer.com's Great American Beer Bar competition. However, the battle is not over yet, as there are seven Colorado bars, one in Nevada and (sigh) a place in Scottsdale to beat out to win the possibly prestigious title of Best Beer Bar in the Mountain West region.

Arizona Beer Week, which claims to represent our entire state, is throwing their weight behind the Scottsdale establishment, so T&B needs all the help it can get:

Voting is as easy as clicking two times with your mouse, so represent for Tucson. It would be a nice birthday present for the city, after all, to win something for once.

You'll be able to pick up a glass of Heroes 19, a collaborative-effort brown ale created to raise money for the families of the Granite Mountain Hotshot Crews, a few places in Tucson now-to-soonish (Barrio, Gentle Ben's, Tap & Bottle, Thunder Canyon), but if you want to start your drinking/donating today, Barrio is hosting a tap and toast today (Friday) at 5. Enjoy.

Last year, CraftBeer.com's Great America Beer Bar Contest showed zero love for Arizona. In fact, on the map that accompanied the results, our state was largely covered by the event's logo. To some extent, the snub is understandable. We're stuck in the Mountain West region for the purposes of this competition and since that region includes Colorado, where every city block is legally required to have either a brewery or great craft brew bar, we're probably screwed. But that doesn't mean we can't try to do better this year.

They're taking nominations until Monday, Aug. 19 for this year's contest and while I personally voted for Tap & Bottle, there are a number of options in town that should at least be considered. Maybe this year, the outline of Arizona can make the map at very least.

Sahuarita is not a dry community by design. Believe me, you live down in this Stepford-like community long enough and you're going to want to drink.

But when the El Charro restaurant on Rancho Sahuarita Blvd. closed in mid-June, it left this suburb of 26,000-plus without an actual place to sit down and enjoy a beer, a margarita or a couple-three shots of Jack. I mean, unless you don't mind sitting on the curb outside the Fry's Marketplace or the Super Stop.

El Charro's owners said at the time it planned on opening a gastropub in the El Charro spot in the near future, but it wasn't until I saw the permanent sign for Pub 22 go up this week that I was convinced it would actually happen.

• Actual physical proof of a (future) Sahuarita bar

When, exactly, that Pub 22 will open, though, is anyone's guess.

A noticeably flustered worker told me today he "hopes" the joint will open in about two weeks, though it all depends on when "all the little details" are taken care of. A quick look inside makes it seem that all the infrastructure is in place, including some nice-sized TVs, lots of steel and grunge decor, as well as 24 tap handles. The plan is to have possibly 16 craft beers on tap, along with a menu that will still incorporate the El Charro brand of Mexican food along with "Italian food, great American food, some awesome mac & cheese" and who knows what else.

Just let me know when I can start a tab.

No idea how this came about, but today marks the third celebration of IPA Day. Maybe I shouldn't ask too many questions and just enjoy the opportunity to grab a hopped up beverage later today.

As an incomplete but hopefully somewhat helpful guide, here's what Tap & Bottle and 1702 are scheduled to have on tap today in the pale ale category:

T&B: Red IPA (1055, Tucson), Black IPA (Mother Road, Flagstaff), White IPA (Wasatch, Park City, Utah), Black IPA on Nitro (SanTan, Chandler), Mycenary DIPA (Odell, Fort Collins, Colorado), Two Hearted IPA (Bell's, Kalamazoo, Michigan), Heelch O'Hops DIPA (Anderson Valley, Boonville, CA) & Mongo DIPA (Port, San Marcos, California)

1702: Stingray Point IPA (Coronado, Coronado, California), Dragoon IPA (Dragoon, Tucson), Lumberyard IPA (Lumberyard, Flagstaff), Black IPA (Mother Road, Flagstaff), Hopageddon (Napa Smith, Napa, California), Deviant Dale’s IPA and Gubna Imperial IPA (Oskar Blues, Lyons, Colorado), Anniversary Strong Pale Ale (Port, San Marcos, California), Hop Therapy DIPA (Rough Draft, San Diego), Black IPA (Santa Fe Brewing, Santa Fe, New Mexico), Enjoy By DIPA and Ruination IPA (Stone, Escondido, California), Hop Ride IPA (Tenaya Creek, Las Vegas, Nevada), Thunder Canyon IPA (Thunder Canyon, Tucson)

Also notable, the Loft is knocking a buck off their IPAs tonight.

In what's one of the coolest bits of news coming out of Tucson's beer scene, the quickly-growing and widely renowned Dragoon Brewing Company is set to partner with New Belgium Brewing Company in a collaborative effort set to launch in late September.

According to Tristan White of Dragoon, the collaboration was something that was completely out of the blue — and by his telling, something that they were skeptical of actually happening.

"I was just getting off of my shift [at Dragoon's tap room], so I was tired and about to head home when this guy walks up to me and says he's from a brewery. Now, we get this all the time, someone coming and saying that they're from a place, usually something small I haven't heard of...but he starts asking all these really interesting questions and complimenting us on the beer, so I ask 'Wait, what brewery did you say you were with again?'"

Ben Rutlidge is who White spoke to that day, a brewer with New Belgium who happened to be in Tucson visiting breweries with his brother-in-law.

"When I walked in [to Dragoon] I was just blown away — not just by the number of styles they had, but also at the quality of the beer," Rutlidge said.

"So he said to us 'Maybe when I get back to Colorado [where New Belgium is based, out of Fort Collins] I'll see if we can collaborate,'" White said. "I thought 'pfft, right' — then he calls us two weeks later, and we were like 'oh my gosh!'"

This is the second time that New Belgium has gone on the road to another brewery to collaborate on a beer, and it holds a special, local significance to both Rutlidge and Rhonda Kendrick, New Belgium's brewery representative for Southern Arizona.

"For us, I think it's showing our appreciation of local beer and grassroots companies and how they start," Kendrick said. "I think the perception is that large breweries are going to come in and take over, and that local breweries are going away, and I want us to squash that perception. We're people, we have families and we live in the places that we sell beer," she said.

Rutlidge agrees. "For me, I'm proud to be doing this because Tucson's become my second home — it's an amazing region. I think not enough people know what an awesome city it is here."

White didn't hold back: "It's a freaking honor," he said, later noting how incredible it is that a brewery that's considered one of the Big Three of the craft beer world is "trusting [Dragoon] with their name."

While a press release announcing the beer has the style under wraps, Rutlidge and White informed me that the aim is to create a hoppy, German-style lager that's "darker than a pale ale, but not as dark as an amber ale," according to White. The philosophy, according to White and Rutlidge, was to create something that reflects the new-meets-old aspect of their collaboration.

As such, the plan is for the beer to take the old, trusted lager style and change it up by using ingredients that are growing in popularity, such as midnight wheat, and citra and french aramis hops, an aspect of the collaboration with New Belgium that Dragoon appreciates, as the older brewery has contacts and a reputation within the industry that allows for them to get new and interesting ingredients as soon as they're available. "They have access to all this awesome stuff, which is one of the biggest benefits to working with them. We had to buy it, of course, but still," White laughs.

"We wanted to make something that would fit in well at the end of September in Tucson," Rutlidge said. "When it's hot, or when you're out golfing, you don't want to be drinking something heavy, like an IPA."

"We asked ourselves, do we want to do something really big? Something simple? Something esoteric? ... we decided to make something sessionable [around or below 5% alcohol by volume] that's highly drinkable," White said. "I don't want to have to think constantly about how to put more and more weird stuff in our beer — I just want to think about how we can make beers people will want to drink."

The beer, which has yet to be named (something that White joked is "totally [Dragoon's] style — we never name beers until they're about to go into the keg"), will begin brewing at Dragoon on Aug. 2, when Rutlidge will come down to get working with White and Dragoon's brewer, Eric Greene. After the brewing and lagering processes finish, the plan is to launch the beer at the Great Tucson Beer Festival, on Sept. 28. From there, the beer will be sold at a number of locations in Tucson, as well as a few in Phoenix and at the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins.

Keep watch on the Facebook pages for both Dragoon Brewing and New Belgium Southern Arizona for more.

As officials declare the Yarnell Hill Fire completely contained, and after Billy Warneke, one of the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots who died fighting the blaze, was honored yesterday in Marana, Arizonans continue to find ways to benefit the families of firefighters who were lost.

Prescott Brewing Company has announced that they will begin brewing a commemorative beer, "Heroes 19," next week, with plans to donate all proceeds from the beer's sales to the families of the fallen firefighters:

PBC has volunteered to brew a special commemorative beer next week at our production plant here in Prescott in collaboration with the 40 or so INDEPENDENT craft breweries who are members of the AZ Craft Brewers Guild. It will contain 19 varieties of hops and this beer will have a color of 19 (on our color scale) all being donated by the individual breweries, with all the specialty malts being donated by Briess Malting in Wisconsin. 60 barrels of beer (1860 gallons, over 14,000 Pints) Brewed & kegged in Prescott and distributed to our member breweries all over the state for sale on draft with all the proceeds going to Prescott Firefighters Charities. Hensley Beverage is helping with all the distribution & keg coordination, maybe other distributors as well. "Heroes 19" American Brown Ale should hit the taps around the end of the month.

No word yet on whether or not Heroes 19 will be available in Southern Arizona. For more information, head to Prescott Brewing Company's Facebook page.

This just in from Rocco's Little Chicago:

Holy cats! Today's our last day on God's green Earth with Old Style in the house. Help my staff drink it up tonight, 5 till close, buck a can!

The word is that the local distributor of Old Style, Finley Distributing, simply hasn't gotten enough orders to continue supplying the beer, so it's being discontinued.

Rocco's also appears to have some prizes available for fellow lovers of Old Style, including this glorious number:

• Rocco's Little Chicago/Facebook
• Majestic.

The magic begins at 5 p.m., so get there soon so you can begin saying goodbye to Old Style.