Brewers have traditions, habits, idiosyncrasies, rituals; you name it. One perennial tenet of Diamond Knot's production brewery is metal.

Sure, there's lots of stainless, but what they're talking about is floor-shaking, ear-piercing, guitar-shredding heavy metal.

Whether it's cookie-monster black metal or progressive metal with its 18-minute long songs, visitors are guaranteed to hear some hard stuff when they walk into the production brewery in Mukilteo.

Iron Maiden is perhaps best known for their explorations into the darkness of "The Number of the Beast." Ozzy Osbourne has most certainly gone there, as well. In the end, it's really just a number: 666.

As Diamond Knot's brewers approached the 666th batch of beer brewed at the production brewery, they decided that it was imperative to do something fun, silly and devilishly delicious by incorporating "666" into every possible aspect of this beer.

Thus was born the "Number of the Yeast.”

The 666 bottle label has:

• A 66.6 minute mash

• 666 grams of first-wort hops

• A 66.6 minute boil

• Two 666-gram aroma hop additions

• Fermented at 66.6 degrees Fahrenheit

• Only 66.6 cases were packaged (OK, it was 66 and 2/3, only because they can't make 0.6 cases)

Go to www.diamondknot.com for a list of retail locations. Sales of 666 began Feb. 2, when the beer had been aged for exactly 666 days.

-Edited by Beacon staff