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Lagunitas Brewing Tour & Tasting
The day after getting back to Kentfield from Vancouver, I went on an amazing brewery tour/tasting. Lagunitas, one of my favorite breweries, is located fairly close to Kentfield, so on a whim I called them and discovered that they do a tour with a tasting at 3:00pm every weekday! I raced up highway 101 to Petaluma and just barely made it in time.
I would strongly recommend this free beerstravaganza for any beer lover in the Bay Area. The first 40 minutes of the hour-long tour are devoted to a beer tasting in the cool loft space overlooking their bottling line. The tasting space is plastered with decorated in a style that can only be appropriately referred to as “heady”, which shouldn’t be surprising since one of their flagship ales was formerly known as The Kronik (it is now labeled as “Censored” after the California ABC forced them to change the name). The tasting encompases five beers: four of their year-round beers including The Kronik and their current seasonal ale.
The seasonal for my tour is pictured above: Wilco Tango Foxtrot (or, as our tour guide called it, What The Fuck ale). The label describes it as “A Malty, Robust Jobless Recovery Ale”; it is dark and sweet (from all that malt) but with enough hoppy bitterness to keep it from becoming saccharine; it’s a good late-winter seasonal but wouldn’t hold its own on a permanent basis. The other three regulars, aside from The Kronik, are the Pils, the New Dogtown Pale and the IPA. The Pils is a Czech-style Pilsner, their only non-ale and my least favorite of the tasting. The Kronik is a rich amber ale, which I would call crisp and sharp without being all that hoppy. Very tasty, but it could be hoppier. The Pale Ale and IPA really turn up the hop-factor, but contrary to what a knowledgeable ale drinker might expect, the Pale is actually hoppier (has a higher IBU rating) than the IPA. According to the tour guide, this apparent discrepancy is a result of Lagunitas’ decision to change their Pale Ale recipe a few years back—hence the “New Dogtown” name—while keeping their original IPA recipe. Regardless, both are fabulous ales if you’re into hoppy beers; as a bit of a hop maniac myself, I guess I’d have to give the nod to the Pale. Sadly we didn’t get to taste Hop Stoopid, their 104 IBU beer, but I have had it before and it is absolutely KILLER.
While we were tasting our five beers, the awesome tour guide related some interesting and often hilarious Lagunitas anecdotes and trivia. For example, while they’re still named after Lagunitas, the Marin county town in which they were founded, the brewery is now located in Petaluma (in Sonoma county) because the Marin Sanitation Department gave him an ultimatum to pay or move after the dregs of his fermentation process began causing sewer problems. Also, recently they moved from their original Petaluma location to a bigger facility across the street and in order to complete the move they threw a gigantic party in the parking lot and then had all 1200 guests pitch in to carry equipment across the street, which is really representative of the freewheeling, community-oriented nature of Lagunitas Brewing. I’m sure I can’t do justice to the rest of the stories, but you can read a pretty decent if outdated article about Lagunitas here.
(Lagunitas Kegs Stacked In The Brewery)
After the tasting we got a quick walkthrough of their brewing facility, which was cool because they were actually working while we were there, but was disappointing because it was extremely brief and offered very little depth or detail on their process and equipment. I’m a nerd and a homebrewer, I need technical details! But all in all, it was a fantastic value for $0 as well as an inspiring vision of where an avid homebrewer can take their vision.
