Gluggmug family

The Gluggmugs are a family of hobgoblins who brew, and who are said to distill as well, though the traveler who said so had never tried any of it. What carries their name is a cheap ale, and the thing worth knowing about the ale is that it is a good deal better than what it costs.

Mikhail found that out in his first week in Idir, playing a tavern at Forven for a bed, a meal and two drinks a night that were not to be expensive ones. He tried a Gluggmug on the third day and drank nothing else for the rest of the week, because it was genuinely enjoyable and still inside what he could order without trouble. He learned Gluggmug was a family at all on the sixth night, from a straight-backed traveler with a city accent who leaned toward wines and took a Gluggmug only when he was slumming.

The mark is two letters, GM, in G’lin, burned into the bottom of the barrel lid. Aldo had opened enough barrels to know it on sight, which is how he came to recognize it inside a ring he had already stolen. He woke in Ravenhold with no memory of the night and none of the hobgoblin woman whose nightstand he had emptied, and among what he had taken were two rings, one of them wooden with a thin iron band running through it much the way an iron band runs around a cask. The letters were inside that one. He said he hoped he had not robbed the Gluggmugs, wondered aloud whether their warehouses ran on universal locks, and kept the key that had come out of the same drawer. He had. The woman was a Gluggmug, and the rings and the key were the house’s own.

He never worked it out. The ring was lifted off him and has sat in the Loshev guard’s stores since, though he has asked Tariq for it back. The ale traveled further than the question did. Long after, and the length of Idir away, a serving woman in a Haudh-Gwenn inn set a cup down in front of Mikhail and told him it was Gluggmug’s finest.