News From Lagunitas

Friday afternoon, I headed down to Petaluma.  The idea was to talk to the folks down there that I knew and take a look at the new brewhouse.  I joined the folks on the tour for a minute, but was quickly sidetracked by tasty brews and good conversation.  In the end, I came away with some news that all of you might like to hear. 

First, let’s recap the “tour”.  I spent the majority of my time at the tasting bar.  On the card were the Pils, Kronik, IPA, Maximus, and Gnarlywine.  We were lucky enough to get to sample the Gnarly ’08 on tap (delicious) as well as the ’09 from the bottle.  There was some Hop Stoopid in the cask still flowing so samples of that were passed around as well as a fresh keg of Pale Ale which arrived as we were finishing.  I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have more of that ’08 Gnarly Wine to walk around with, so that’s what I did.

The new brewhouse and fermenter’s are impressive.  the system has been upgraded from a 30 bbl system to the current 80 bbl size.  This has allowed the folks at Lagunitas to scale back from the 24-7 production they were involved with before to a more reasonable 2 brews a day, leaving nights for sleeping.  I also noticed quite a few oak barrels around the brewery, which always bodes well for the beer drinking public.  Personally, I was tempted to steal one of the barrels marked Reuben, that has to be a tasty brew.

Now for the news.  We’ll start with the good news.  Lagunitas has changed some marketing strategies which will put a hoppier selection more readily available to public.  Say farewell to Maximus in the 22 oz bottles.  Lagunitas’ first foray into the Imperial IPA will be moved to 6-packs exclsively.  Any available Maximus 22 oz bottles are the last.  In the place of the Maximus 22′s, look for more Hop Stoopid, the bigger, hoppier, maltier cousin of Maximus.  This is good news as I absolutely love Hop Stoopid and welcome additional availablity of the brew.

With good news usually comes bad news.  It appears the Frank Zappa series of beers is now dead.  While the exact reason for the end of the agreement is all rumor, apparently Gail, Frank’s widow, has decided to end the licensing of the album artwork for the bottles.  This is bad news because I think we were all looking forward to a beer bearing the name Uncle Meat.  I was assured that the beers we would have seen for the Zappa series will still make their way to the consumer, but simply bear a different name and label.  Maybe this will allow these beers to make their way to kegs as well since the album art isn’t such a requirement.  In the end, I just wonder if the new brews bearing “traditional” names will still have the experimental inspiration that the beers bearing Frank’s album art had possesed.

So there you have it, some news from Petaluma.  Soem good, some bad, some just about me drinking beer.  I try to appeal to all sorts.