Tonight I’m sipping on a Lagunitas Sucks. I’ve developed a moderate obsession with this
brewery over the past two years or so.
It’s gone from me not really caring or thinking about them much at all,
to ranking easily among my favorite American breweries right now. This obsession has two identifiable geneses:
the release of Lagunitas Sucks, the first brew of theirs that really made me
sit up & take notice, having since become one of my favorite DIPAs &
seasonals; & an interview with founder/owner Tony Magee by beer
writer/podcaster Slouch Sixpack on the Aleheads podcast from spring of
2012. There are very few breweries that
get “love letter” space in the blog, but I’ve wanted to sit down & outline
what it is I find so magnetic about this brewery. Here goes!
1.
The way their beers taste. Kind of a no-brainer, right? That’s why I started with it. Many of Lagunitas’ brews have a signature
commonality in their flavor profile, a balance of bright hops, a more subdued
kind of poundcake sweetness, & an anchoring dankness, a really resiny
flavor that pulls you in. This is right
in my wheelhouse for where hoppy beers should be, & their catalog has that
thread running through it. Maybe it’s a
house yeast strain, a recurrent hop schedule, or something, but man does it hit
home.
2.
The
familial resemblance among their beers. This
kind of ties in with the first one, but some have said (disparagingly or not)
that Lagunitas basically makes myriad versions of an IPA. Which is cool, in my book – they’re all tied
in to the same kind of vibe, like a band making different records with their
own sound but based on the same unifying aesthetic. Lagunitas’ repertoire is distinctly theirs,
each beer has their recognizable thumbprint on it.
3.
The Stone
comparison. Again, related to the
first two: Stone seems to have a commonality among their beers – namely,
abrasive bitterness & arrogant aggression.
Lagunitas is like Stone meets Cheech & Chong, with a mellow,
laid-back, sun-baked kind of motif.
Hop-driven, but with homage to hops’ infamous & euphoric cousin.
4.
The can
take or leave style. While all
somewhat IPA-adjacent, much of Lagunitas’ repertoire abuts on IPA, double IPA,
American strong ale, west coast barleywine, brown ale, you name it, all at
once. They seem to not much care for
those categorizations, but more for brewing what they want. One story goes that a homebrew club contacted
the owner, asking to know the specific style of one of their releases. Magee’s reply: “Uzbeki Raga Ale”. And the chagrin commenceth, with the gnashing
of teeth…
5.
They’re
dead cheap. For a west coast brewery
producing the caliber of beer they do, their prices are awesome. Hop Stoopid retails in our store for
$5.00. A bomber. That’s an awesome price for such a damn good
DIPA. Just about everything they make
falls into line. Don’t know why this is
the case, but it makes them all the easier to love.
6.
Their
marketing. Their fuzziness with
style kind of translates to the fuzziness found in their marketing. Their label art is like looking at someone’s
sketchbook, both simplistic & underdeveloped but with a rich trough of
detail. Tony does their copy, &
often the cramped text on the labels reads like something out of Kerouac or Burroughs,
stream-of-conscious, sometimes conveying a point, sometimes huh? (Another parallel to Stone) To this point, they have a beer called
Lagunitas Sucks, another called WTF, another called Undercover Investigation
Shutdown, another formerly known as The Kronik, etc. In fact, I found myself dipping into his
style the more I write while drinking the beer…
7.
They made
a line of beers based on Frank Zappa’s catalog.
Okay, I can’t stand Zappa.
But this is an awesome idea. They
got five deep, brewing a different beer based on each album, until the Zappa
estate withdrew. This is the kind of
idea that I’d want to base an entire brewery around. I only hope no-one’s done it with the Wu-Tang
Clan yet…
8.
The drug stuff. In the above-mentioned Aleheads
interview, Tony Magee said of his employment practices, “We have a strict
drug-testing policy. You have to have
tested drugs at least once.” I’m not a
head myself, but it’s always been amusing & kind of captivating how open
Magee & the company are about the use of cannabis. They had a beer known as The Kronik, now
called CENSORED, as the name didn’t pass label approval with the Tax &
Trade Bureau. Undercover Investigation
Shutdown was brewed to commemorate the time the brewery got a twenty day
shutdown as a slap on the wrist after law enforcement caught visitors smoking
pot during tasting hours, a ritual the owner apparently condoned.
9.
Tony’s
twitter feed. The company doesn’t
send out press releases or do much publicity – Tony tweets about it, usually
serially over the course of a few minutes, & the press picks it up. The decision to open a second brewery in Chicago
went out over twitter, & became news.
Tony aired some angry opinions over Sam Adams’ covert tactic of “going
after” west coast IPAs, & a buzz starts.
Tony announced his opposition to cans & bauxite mining via twitter,
& folks take notice. It’s both a
kind of lazy & kind of genius way of handling publicity, & it’s one of
the most interesting twitter feeds in the craft beer world.
10.
Tony. If you can’t tell by now, a lot of the appeal
of this brewery has to do with the brains behind the operation. Dude’s become sort of a cult of personality
for me, & some others. He’s both
completely chill & fascinatingly contrarian & iconoclastic. He’s publicly fired shots at New Belgium
& Sierra Nevada, asking what a “f***ing rich business” is doing accepting
public funds to build a new facility. His
background is in music, once touring with a reggae band & writing musical
arrangements for Pizza Hut, Bud, & Hallmark commercials; he still jams
regularly at the brewery during tasting hours.
He’s full of stories, insights, & seems to have an opinion on just
about anything. A big part of Lagunitas’
appeal is the personality that comes through, but the very fact that the
brewery is such a clear expression & extension of its founders is a
beautiful thing. This is part of what’s
so awesome about craft beer in totem, another relation to art: the more
creative control & idiosyncrasy is allowed to remain, the more honest &
authentic - & good - the end product feels.
To me, Tony & Lagunitas embody that approach to the art &
business of beer.
There you go, another long-ass,
gushy post. If you’re interested, I
strongly recommend you listen to the Aleheads podcast interview with Tony; it’s
my favorite beer-related interview, & the only episode of a beer podcast
I’ve ever listened to repeated times.
And I know I gave it the bump last entry, but check out Tom Acitelli’s
The Audacity of Hops; a lot of info on Lagunitas & Magee in there, plus
it’s just a damn good read anyway.
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