There’s a really nice story behind Pretty Things, the husband and wife who met in England and now rent a little brewery space in Massachusetts, paint all their own Lewis Carroll-esque label art, and have a website that’s just cute as a button. If you want to read it, you should.

But first know that they are a brewery, and an exciting, talented one at that. Yesterday, at a beer tasting on the Hill (full of staffers with their suits and their handshakes) I tried Pretty Things Babayaga, the fledgling brewery’s winter seasonal. It’s a delicious 7% abv stout with barley, wheat, and rye; a little rosemary-smoked malt; and 10 lbs. of straight rosemary for every 400 lbs. of ingredients. The smoke was faint; the rosemary wafted like cold winter air in the nose but gave way to roasty malts on the tongue. The beer tastes, in a sensory, direct way, like chopping firewood.

Only thing is — and I feel bad telling you this — Pretty Things doesn’t distribute to D.C. yet. They have a distributor in the area, but at the moment they’re not making enough beer to supply the area. But look for them when they do make it down. Their use of creative flavors is similar to Bruery, another start-up that’s making waves on the twitter-thing, and Pretty Things brewer Dann Paquette‘s years of brewing experience shows — both the rosemary in Babayaga and the plums in their Baby Tree Belgian quad are subtle and complementary, not gimmicky. Here’s to hoping we can drink them soon.