The beer: Lagunitas IPA
ABV: 6.2%
How we got it: I’ve gotten this beer, well, everywhere — this is the story about the first time.
Photo by The Lagunitas Brewing Company
What they say: Lagunitas says this beer is brewed with 43 different hops and 65 various malts. It was originally brewed as their first seasonal back in 1995. “Big on the aroma with a hoppy-sweet finish that'll leave you wantin' another sip,” they say.
What you say: This beer has a 3.4 rating on Untappd and a 3.91 on Beer Advocate.
What Mike says —
I don’t know exactly when the great pale ale revolution started in the USA but I know when it started for me: July, 2009.
I was on a trip in Northern California with my future wife. Ryan had a conference in San Francisco. I had never been to the foggy city by the Bay and was invited to come along. After she was done doing business, Ryan and I drove the 70-odd miles down the coast to Santa Cruz.
My buddy Liam moved to Santa Cruz from New York after college. Him and his girlfriend were more than happy to have us for a night or two as we rounded out our West Coast jaunt.
We hadn’t kept in close touch but Liam is one of those quality individuals that even if you haven’t talked to him in a few years you can quickly fall into a conversation like it’s old times. My recollection is that we arrived at his place around appropriate drinking time. We sat on the floor -- I don’t recall if this was because the furniture situation was tenuous or we just wanted to sit on the floor, as one does on occasion -- and we drank a case of beer. My old friend and host served us a beer that was made two hours away in Petaluma, California: Lagunitas IPA.
It wouldn’t be long before Lagunitas was everywhere in the USA but at the time in 2009 it certainly wasn’t on my NYC radar back in Astoria, Queens. To be fair, no IPAs were on my radar at this time. Months earlier, my buddies and I had just completed our second annual PBR tour of New York. The PBR tour was exactly what it sounded like: a bunch of friends going bar to bar drinking (at the time $2 or less) cans of PBR. My home beer could be summed up as this: also PBR.
Sitting on that floor in Surf City, USA, that July night though, I was converted. It’s the first time to my recollection I detected a floral force in a beer -- and I really liked it. Even my unrefined palate could detect that bountiful bitter grapefruitiness (sic) -- and I really liked that, too. We drank the whole case and went out for tacos, and nothing was ever the same.
When I got back to New York I started seeking out Lagunitas. Maybe they had been there waiting for me before, but it wasn’t until after Santa Cruz that I recall seeing it on tap around town. When I didn’t see that logo with the dog with the patch over its left eye on a tap at the bar, my next question for the bartender was, “What IPAs do you have on tap?” And when I didn’t see the stout brown bottles in that red and white six pack holder affixed with the slogan, “Beer speaks, propel mumble,” I would reach for one of the other craft varieties starting to appear in the neighborhood -- Oskar Blues Pale Ale, Dogfish Head 60 minute, various other IPAs... but it had to be IPA.
Five years after that Santa Cruz trip, Ryan and I were in Chicago, this time she was tagging along on one of my business trips. We spent an afternoon in South Chicago at the Lagunitas brewery.
In 2012, the brewery added this location to double their output to a total of 1.2 million barrels of beer a year. That ought to tell you how big this beer has begun since me and it met each other in my friend Liam’s beach bungalow. Now-a-days I don’t reach for Lagunitas the way I used to. I’m less excited when I see it on tap at a bar. But it’ll always be the first.