You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. In the studio today, we have... Oh, I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. I'm Lexi, also do communications at Binny's. I'm Roger, I do beer for Binny's, and I am very excited today because it is a beer episode, and we have a very special guest in the studio today, all the way from California. It's Jeremy Marshall from Lagunitas Brewing Company. Hey, everybody, Jeremy Marshall, Brew Monster, Lagunitas Brewing Company. Flew here from San Francisco, but I'm born and raised in Tennessee. We're going to learn a lot about me today. Okay. Roger, we've never done Lagunitas on this show before? We have not. I said Jeremy or nothing. That's okay. That's fine. How is that possible though? Because Jeremy wasn't out here in Chicago when there was a Lagunitas Chicago. Oh, there sure was. That was many riot fests got started with the burping hoppy hoppy IPAs. I never made it to a riot fest. Oh, really? Yeah. It was like a block and a half away. Yeah. Yeah. At the park. Yeah. That I was told never to go to at night. Fair enough. And I went to it every night when we were building the brewery. Nothing bad ever happened. Nothing bad ever happened to you? No. No. There was a lot of like commerce, I guess you could call it. In California at the time, that was a $20 fine. And here it was a longer stint, that kind of commerce. You guys are all for it now. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I passed something earlier that was called the Dank Center. But it wasn't a dispensary. The Donk House? The Donk House. I can get my weed in there. And Stephen was like, no, no, actually, you can't. That's just Germans. They called themselves Dank House. Yep. So we're excited because we've been around this for a little bit, especially Greg and myself. I bumped into Roger in the bathroom earlier and he was like, are you excited that you get to talk about how we are used to taste? I was in that bathroom earlier and it's kind of small. Yeah, it was. So I can picture this encounter and it was because it's small, it makes it more awkward. Straddling the sink and the urinal. That's what happened. Thanks for that visual. Yeah, we love talking about beer and you're a veteran of the industry. And I think you when people think Lagunitas, you've kind of always been a face. But can you take us back to what got you into beer and how did you end up at Lagunitas? My story is not so special, but it's still fun to tell. It was a home brewer before I was 21, and this was back to Tennessee at a time when there wasn't a lot of good beer. So going back to the kind of the 90s, making beer when I was in high school, and then just got this idea like, oh man, this is so cool. And I was doing a lot of things that I realized probably my beer was terrible. Like I did a oak beer and threw all the oak into the boil, and boiled it, so it literally tasted like a liquid popsicle stick. Did you not read? No, no. How did you manage to brew? I just, I made liquid wood and thought it was amazing. And then got better and better and then said, wouldn't it be cool if I could do this for a living? Looked into the two brew schools at the time. Ironically, one was Siebel, which is in Chicago, and the other one was UC Davis, which is in California. And then behind that, one, Siebel is a little bit more lager-centric. And I like a good lager, but I'm always been more of a ale guy. As UC Davis, the teachers there were British, and I'm like, hey, I know British guys, those are ale guys. Dr. Charlie Banforth and Dr. Michael Lewis. So that landed me in California, and that's how I found Lagunitas. And a lot of craft brewing owes its roots to the home brewers that came and kind of nurtured that movement. For sure. Also high five to another fellow ale guy. You're an ale guy? Yes. Yeah. I can be a lager guy. I'll switch. Lager's fine. Yeah. But these guys all grew up drinking beer that tasted kind of bad naturally, and they all associated that with how beer is supposed to taste. Yeah. Just commodity yellow beer. Yeah. Yeah. It's a thing, but it's got its place. I call that spacers. Spacers. Yeah. Hydration. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that kind of ties into one of the things I wanted to ask you, is I'm curious what the scene is like out in California right now. I'm not going to lie, Chicago breweries are often looking towards California to see what you're doing and to get inspiration. We've been noticing West Coast Pilsner is a thing, and so is California Pilsner. We've seen both of those terms thrown around. Is that happening around you? Is that a SoCal thing? What do you think about all this? Yeah. This has got to be like San Diego where there's more breweries than people. But yeah, I think brewers are a little, they're just inventing styles left and right to try to keep it going. It is great that we came down off the milkshake and smoothie beer movement, or the this can will explode if you don't. I always thought that was cool. It's like, did I just buy a grenade that's going to paint the inside of my fridge red? It's like the bus in speed, except it has to be below a certain temperature. It's exactly like that. In fact, we'll feed that into the AI and get a nice little video. Okay. Yeah. As long as we can have Keanu. I heard a little bit about that. I think that's more of a SoCal thing. People are doing everything. I think at the same time, the craft beer industry and its fans and its brewers are in a great state of change, as is the world as well. There's a lot of people trying to figure it out, so to speak. I noticed there's been some breweries that are using lager yeast in an IPA and then just not even saying anything about it. It seems like IPL is a dirty word, and because they didn't work 20 years ago, we have to abandon it and come up with a different way to say IPL. Does it matter if you make an IPA with a lager yeast? I mean, I feel like Lagunitas never used to even say what the style of their beers were. It used to be kind of the running joke was, it's an American strong ale. Yeah, it's going to pack some punch. Yeah, Tony wasn't super keen on styles, but the grand irony is he kind of really created a lot for IPA. He went after a style at a time when pale ales ruled. But there is something, I think we're supposed to call that a cold IPA now. It's already had its five minutes. Yeah. You got to reimagine your styles. Yeah, IPL is kind of a dirty word these days. But if you take a lager yeast, it is a different genus and species, right? So there's the saccharomyces is all the sugar-loving yeast, is literally what it means, or sugar-loving fungus. And then there's like, if it's a lager, it's one species and if it's an ale, it's another. But if you throw enough hops at it, you kind of drown out the character. I think it's all a blur. There is a new yeast called Nova that really splits the difference. So it's a lager that behaves like an ale and has all of that clean ester free, so it doesn't make a lot of fruity notes of its own. It just makes a really blank canvas. And technically, it's a lager yeast. So even the people that are in the back breeding the yeast, whatever that looks like, picture a bunch of white coats and drunks together in a room. I've met some of the yeast geeks. They're interesting people. Oh, I know a lot of them. I like them a lot. But they're even blurring the categories much the same way that the brewers are. Roger, I was told there was beer on this episode. There is. Can you not wait? No, I can't. No, he cannot. So this question's for Greg. What? The other thing that we've noticed as of late in California is that West Coast IPAs are becoming a thing again, which I was like, Greg loves old school IPA. And I'm like, Greg, you're about to have your moment. They're coming back. Every time we pop a West Coast style IPA, it's like gold in color. It's thin. There's not malt. There's not malt to balance out hoppiness. So it ends up seeming like just a little sharp and bitter and not what I want. Yeah, there's an absolute crusade against malt. What the hell? It started with firing crystal malt and then it got more and more and more extreme. We just brewed a beer using no malt, 100 percent oats. You brewed an oat beer? Yeah, it was great. Oh. Yeah. As someone who loves malt, yeah, you would hate this beer. Oh. I would love this beer. We just did it because all of the malt suppliers said, don't do that. You know, if you tell us, don't do that, we're a bunch of dumb brewers. Definitely going to do that. But you're right about the resurgence of, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So we have hazies, and then who's going to see who can make the most turbid porridge beer. It gets to the point where you pour your beer and you put a spoon in there and you make sure it doesn't fall over. And you're like, that's a proper hazy. It's just nothing but sludge. Yes. And then we all got a tummy ache. Yeah. And then you get a tummy ache. Yeah. Yeah. And it's probably some interesting like gas and things, because it's a lot of yeast, a lot of schlarf that you're having. Wait, is that an actual word? It's an actual word. Really? Yeah. We say it a lot around the brewery. A schlarf is what goes wrong with every piece of equipment. Like if the centrifuge is plugged, probably schlarf. It's probably schlarf. Yeah. I opened up the bottom of the tank, nothing's coming out, it's probably schlarf. Yeah. That's what we call like a dick mix of dry hops and spent hops and yeasts all mixed together and making hazies. They're schlarfy. So now people really want clear. They want clear again. They want clear IPA. That was like the antithesis of what you guys did though. Like I mentioned before, the running joke when a new Lagunitas came out, one of my coworker go, what do you think of the new Lagunitas? Best damn American strong ale I've ever had. You guys did that awesome balance of tons of caramelized malt with that hot bitterness. Is that gone forever or are you still making beers like that out in California at the original brewery or? Yeah, it definitely hasn't gone out. I think there's still people who crave those kind of, I hate to say it's a cliché, but balanced beers. Balanced but big. But not just shoving your face 100 miles per hour into a pine forest with no malt backbone. Right. Then of course, all these new hops, and I can talk about hops all days. I think about hops like boy bands. There's the Justin Bieber hops, and then there's the Timberlake hops. There's all these different hop, and then there's always new hops bringing with them a certain flavor profile. Craft Brewers traditionally always been like lemmings. If one jumps off, they all jump off. So once something's popular, they all rush to it and just do it all at the same time. So that's why we're waiting to the Hazy Fatigue is here, and then we're going to go national with a Lagunitas Hazy IPA. Yeah, everybody's clamor in the Lagunitas Hazy IPA. Better a little bit late than never. So you were kind enough to get us some brewery fresh beer. So can we try this new one? What do we want to try first? Maybe that hazy? What do you think? Let's see what we got. Is it actually coming out right now? When's it coming out? This we will do later. I don't have a date yet. I think it isn't draft in this area now, maybe a select place, or I know it's coming in December, because it's national 2026. But yeah, I have yet to see it out in the wild yet. We need the annual Gantt chart of releases. I'm not a Gantt chart guy. I will make slides, but begrudgingly, you don't strike me as a slide guy. No, I don't like slides. We're talking about PowerPoint slides. I do like slides that take you from one floor to another. Those are great. That's great. Those are actually great. I bet you like this sound. Yes, sir. For those of you listening in, this is a Crowler of beer that has been shipped here. You overnighted Crowlers. And they made it cold. Perfect condition, not a ding. Thank you, Brynn. If she's listening, she did this. We get mailed a lot of beer, and a lot of the times it looks like it was shot out of a cannon. Brynn, why don't you go on break? Can you grab me a glass? You know that used to be how you got beer from point A to point B, is you would put it in the cannon, and you would shoot it where you wanted it to land. Yeah. So we're sampling a Lagunitas hazy IPA, and why didn't we call it like Disco Biscuit Muffins, or some sort of cool name like everybody else does? I just assumed they've all been used. They've all been used. It's true. There's a little bit of that, but we just thought, let's just name it what it is, and let's not try and be too cute. Let's not give it some arcane obtuse kind of name that no one can say or remember, and let's just call it the style. We're kind of into that right now. It seems like once brewers hear about something, then it really takes off. Did I take a peek in here that this has the hop formerly known as 586? You've done your homework. I'm impressed. The hop formerly known as HBC 586, which another West Coast brewer, my friend Roger at Faction, great dude, goes this hop has everything that makes me hate you about it. Just intense, all that passion fruit, all that Lagunitas hop, you need to try it. So back when it was a numbered hop, we brought it in. And then our friends in Yakima got this great idea to name it Crush. It was a bunch of old guys in their 40s who had cool gen alpha kids who are talking about skibidi toilets. And then they got this name. We could name the hop skibidi. Well, that's a little weird. How about we name it Crush, but Crush with a K. And every brewer like kind of smirked and snarked a little bit at first that they went and called it that. But we've warmed up because now you can have like crush everything in your beer name. You can just you can name it Crush Simcoe, Crush Citra, whatever you want to call it. Crushable. That's like a really tea shot for that. That's like everybody's favorite word out here is if beer is crushable. Oh yeah. Crushable and brewed with crush. So this is going to be kind of the next Citra, if you will. Citra had a good run. It came out and got what came out in a long time ago, but it got kind of popular in 2009 ish. And then it ran all the way through. It's still quite popular, but it is definitely one of the of a success story. Citra is as good of a modern one as you can get. And I think Crush is it's going to follow suit, but maybe not have as wide of an appeal because it has a little bit of a more niche flavor with those tropical fruits. But I think it's going to be pretty big. And then we paired it with Nelson from New Zealand, which is an amazing hop. It provides like grippy, resinous mouthfeel along with like, I like to say like fresh gerbil cage. Like if you've ever opened up those cedar shavings or hamster or guinea pigs, if you don't know that, then I'd say brand new Costco sauna, not used, so not sweat lodge, not a, you know, like a new cedar kind of smell. So we get that from the Nelson, put that with the tropical vibes. Are you getting all that? When I suggest it? Oh, we're huge fans of Nelson. I never shut up about it. It's hard to find appealing sounding descriptors for that. Diesel is one of the most common that people mention. Yeah, not everybody wants to drink diesel. Yeah, or has even smelled it, you know, unless you're long hauling it. Or you live in Hollywood and get to hang out with Vin Diesel, because we know we know he smells like diesel. He has to, right? He has to. He has to. It'd be wrong if he did it. It'd be so wrong. Yeah, and he's coming out with a new cologne. So we can all get with the picture. There we go. It's called Nelson Soffit. It is. Gooseberry. There it is. Late pick Nelson, extra diesel. Gooseberry is our favorite word. Yeah. We'll get the hand worn on that. Because everybody knows what a gooseberry is, right? I love using descriptors that like one person in China knows what you're talking about. Yeah. Well, if you listen to our wine friends, they describe gooseberry as having a foxy aroma. Oh, God. Not foxy. And I go, what's foxy? I mean, fox urine. Like, who knows what fox urine smells like? So I live in California, somewhat rural, which is like we all kind of camp there. If you're not in LA or San Francisco, you're camping. I know what foxes smell like. You should have me on the show where we can battle. We can come up with some better vocabulary. Yeah, I live in wine country, so just don't get me going on Foxy and those wine makers that only work one month out of the year. So what else is in here besides Crush and Nelson? Anything? There's other hops in there, just backbone hops. Those are the showcase. Always a little pinch of Simcoe. We love Simcoe. Kind of our favorite OG hop. But overall, the ones that you're really smelling and tasting is the Crush Nelson. You know, it's a really light-bodied... It's five and a half percent. It's worth mentioning that. It's a little bit of an unusual ABV. This hazy is light on its feet and it's drinkable. Thank you. Dare I say it's crushable. That's what we were going for. It's not going to give you a tummy ache. You could probably have a second can. No tummy ache. And it's not very schlarfy. Not schlarfy. Yeah. I like that tropical kind of thing. It's very tropical. Yeah. It's got almost like a little pineapple, but not really a little mango, but not really slight trees. There's hints of those cedar trees and all that slight pine. Yeah. Very uplifting. Unmalted wheat, malted wheat, probably some oats. It's not overly bearing with the malt. Compared to old school, some of your old school creations that typically averaged about eight or nine percent alcohol. Yeah. 5.5 is pretty sessionable for Lagunitas. It's kind of reigned in. We really had to restrain ourselves with this one because normally our go-to is to say, let's go between somewhere between eight and nine percent. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome. Yeah. Yeah. Got to have more than one. Yeah. With that in mind, I think one of your most iconic beers, we have a case of it sitting here, and it's glorious new package redesign. This has always been our favorite Lagunitas product, so I'm really happy. I was drinking one of these at the instant that the Blackhawks won their last championship. That's why they won. I jumped up at the bar and kind of spilled it a little, and everybody else jumped up right after me, because I was the first one to see that. And when they win, it's acceptable to spray beer all over strangers and have them not get mad. We're talking about a little something something, it is quite an amazing beer. It also there's this little trend that's been going on in Chicago that's always annoyed me. I think Greg is not a fan either where someone just decided that a 7.5 percent alcohol beer was a double IPA. Yeah. We're like, that's not a double IPA. That's a normal IPA. Well, if you're a stickler for the rules, I think it's what Imperial starts at eight. So we're kind of, as usual, half pregnant. That's how Lagunitas likes to be. We're a half pregnant kind of brewery. But 7.5 is often ignored. It's a target for a West Coast IPA. But as everybody knows, this is a wheat beer that's also an IPA. For a long time, it wasn't even billed as an IPA, right? No, it was just Little Something Something, which Tony got that from a Tom Waits lyric. I don't know which song. I like Tom Waits and even live somewhat close to him, but don't know that song. I blame a Little Something Something and Gumball Head for Hazy Beer. I think that that profile is what they were going for when they went for Hazy Beer and they took it too far. I had a Gumball last night. It stands up, man. Yeah. This would be like an imperialized version because Gumball is much lighter. That's one of the OG original Hoppy Wheats. Then so was Little Something Something. She has a name, her name is Millie, and we put Millie back on after much debate, you can imagine. We had so many emails like, where'd she go when she was taken off? They were like, please bring her back, please bring her back. She's fiction, she's not real. I don't know if you've noticed the cartoon. Yeah. Also, I feel pretty G-rated. I was a little, I didn't think it was really that salacious or anything. But it's just at the end of the day, it's a cartoon. We can go back in time and look at how beer used to market itself and come up with much worse examples or commercials from the 70s. Tell us about the wheat component of this, this is kind of interesting, right? You use a couple of different kinds or? There's like that cereal, I think it's called like Diggum Smacks or something like that, honey. It's literally like wheat popcorn. Yeah. The British call that micronizing, but it's basically taking the wheat kernel and popping it using like a microwave. So this has literally, and then they go and call it torrified wheat. Then spell check will always change that to terrified wheat. Every time I'm placing orders, it's like, I need a pallet of terrified wheat. Well, who are you going to get to scare it? I don't know. You can find somebody. That has to be a light pallet. Yeah. The bags are very bulky and it's very puffy. It's a popular ingredient in the English tradition to enhance foam. Not that when you're using as much wheat as this has, wheat is very foam positive already. So we just wanted to use different types of wheat, toasted wheat, roasted wheat, terrified wheat, which will be called torrified, which spell check will change to terrified, and lots of different types of wheat to give it its, what do we call it? It's Wheatly-esk-ness. I think the industry needs to come up with a new term for drinkability. It's like drinkability was ruined by the macro people. In the 1980s. Yeah. It gets so equated with light, insipid, tastes like nothing. Less filling. Yeah, right. But I mean, this beer is, like a lot of Lagunitas beers, can get you in a little bit of trouble real quick because it's so easy to drink. Sitting next to your IPA, which is bitter and sharp and burly, this is the softer version. It's much softer. It's easier to drink version, and it's still seven and a half percent, so it'll still absolutely make you act like a jackass in a sports bar when the Blackhawks went. I mean, you didn't spill that much beer. You think we'll ever see Little Something Extra make a comeback? There's chatter about that. We did the whole Little Something franchising thing way back when. Little Something came out in whatever year that was, 2009, 2010, and then we did Extra, we did Easy, we did Wild, which is like the Belgian IPA version. That was good. Little Something Hazy, of course, had to happen. Little Something Extra, there is chatter of some little duo, something else, little something me. I don't know what it will be. I don't know if it will be the return of the Extra. We were just talking about Extra because we couldn't remember the spice that we added. We grinded grains of paradise. It was like a type of pepper from Africa, and it was like a brown seed. When you grinded it, it turned into purple flower. It smelled very floral, and we would grind that in the brewer's coffee maker. Then after that, all of the brewers would complain about the taste of the coffee. Then we got a dedicated spice grinder for that. That was the Extra and little something extra. I remember grains of paradise because of the Sam Adams summer seasonal. When he had it on the radio, he was advertising it and he went, grains of paradise. You say it so sultry. Yeah. That's about it though. If the suits are listening, how about a variety pack of easy, traditional and extra? Well, you get all three. That would be great. I mean, I think we could never have enough variety packs. It seems like that's the crowd pleaser. Someone goes and they get something, they're going to go to a party. And I think that's a great idea. I'd be happy to do it. I just don't know what all entails to get it to fruition. Roger kicked the suits out before we did the recording. That's why. You're wearing a tie. I know. I always wear it. What can I say? The other blast from the past that I spied in a variety pack that I don't think made it to our neck of the woods, Lucky 13. Oh, yeah. We brought that back recently. Was that last year or the year before? That was the redheaded version of Little Something as a red ale. We're just finding that consumers, unless it's Guinness, which is, as we all know, it looks dark, but it's a surprisingly light beer, and it's having its moment, certainly. But generally, within the craft space, a lot of the color seems to scare people. They just want everything to be this like lighter color. But we brought back Lucky 13 as the dark red ale, and just did it really small. And that's the kind of thing that I am all for as a brewer. I love doing little releases, but then for a large organization, all you're doing is creating tons of complexity. And you don't think it, you just think, I just want to give the people what they want. But then you don't realize, well, there's other people who are in charge of this. You're just making a lot of work for them, because then you got to think about like all those little things like the outer cartons and all the little things and how much waste you'll have, because you've got to order this much. And then you're like, oh, make it to be exactly right where there's not one bottle cap wasted. And then that never happens. For better or worse, I mean, I feel like that there's so many the explosion of nano breweries that really did kind of change the landscape, though. And it's harder to just have core lineups. We kind of bred, at least here in the Ninchicagoland, where there's a million breweries, people have come to expect a new beer all the time, which must be exhausting for brewers, which I think you end up with a lot of beers that aren't necessarily that new. Maybe they rolled the hop dice and picked new hops this week. But for what it's worth, I'm sure you hear this, but we do have a lot of people reaching out that want to see some of these beers come back from your portfolio. So the demand is there. Granted, I can appreciate you got to move some mountains, you got to work with wholesalers and everything, but we love to see some of these beers come back. Yeah, I would be happy to do it, and it's good to get that feedback. Speaking of small and quirky, it won't mean a lot to a lot of the people listening that are in this area, but in our tap room, we do a never-ending array. So I'll open up some fun beers for us to sample just while we chat. But yeah, sometimes to go big, you got to go small. So this is all brewed by, there's a team of three of us, and it's like a 10-hectal-liter system, so that's a thousand liters. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but it's all sold through the tap room at Lagunitas in California. And this beer, speaking of a name that was available, is called Yakamopolis. Yakamopolis. Rolls right off the tongue. It's just celebrating all the hops of the Yakima Valley. Yakamopolis. Yakamopolis. You can remember it because it's got the word mop in there. You can remember it because it has one of the Animaniacs. Yeah. So do you make the trip to Yakima every year, or are you doing some hop selections and stuff? We were making the pilgrimage there, lucky enough to have started before anybody really went up there, except for the big guys. And then all of a sudden, everybody started coming, and I would be talking to hop farmers going, who would have thought I'd be visited by seven brewers so they could select three boxes of hops that they're going to use next year? And then we always joked, like by the time the hops get processed and pellets, you know, because they make them into bales, which is a giant rectangle that weighs roughly 200 pounds. And then they feed those bales into a thing called the Bale Breaker that does what it says, it breaks them up. And then that goes in to make pellets. And almost all the craft brewers are using pellets now. If you went back in the time, they were all using the whole cone and talking about the merits of using the whole cone. And now everybody that used to say all that stuff is totally shut up about it. And like they're all using pellets. You know, all the pellet guys turned out they were right all along. And yeah, it's just, it's just, you know, easier and better. They don't look cool, though. Everyone looks at hot pellets and say... Not as romantic. It looks like... Like hamster food. It looks like the thing at the zoo that you put the quarter in and you feed the llama, you know? Yeah. And I say, you could make beer with that and it would be different. What do you think about, so it seems like something that Lagunitas never shied away from is that it seemed like hop extract had kind of negative connotations, but obviously not all extracts are created equal. Yeah. And I know you were employing some of the higher quality stuff to do hop stupid. It seems like there's all sorts of bizarre new hop, flowable hop products. Oh, flowables. Yeah, yeah. Let me tell you, the holy grail of all of this downstream processing to use another one and flowables is to replace dry hopping, which is like truly the thing that makes a, that puts the craft in the IPA because it's like can't really be automated. It involves climbing up to the top of the tank of already fermented beer and pouring or dropping, you know, hops in to finish beer. So everyone's trying to replace that because you lose, you have losses. It's a lot of work. Somebody could fall off a ladder, blah, blah, blah. And nothing ever really seems to work. So that's the holy grail everyone's chasing. And now is a time when all of there's still what? About like 9000 plus little breweries in the United States, some not little, but most of them little. They've all gone all in on all these crazy new products. And there's so many of them. It's like hard to keep hard to keep track. And they're all using them all. There's like the hop oils, the different types, the all the different emulsification packages, and all of them claim like, you can use this to replace, you know, 200 kilograms of hops. And then brewers use it and say, I don't know if that's true. So I'm just gonna dry hop the way I did and use this. I'm just gonna give the consumers even more crazy flavors. We've always been very into the idea of extracts. And it has a lot of parallels like with the weed industry, like both of them using super critical CO2, for example, to extract and not have there be any solvent. So it's like, hey, let's use a solvent that is A, in beer, right? CO2, yeast makes CO2. So that's why a lot of brewers were open to using hop extract as they looked at it and said, a little something can just started moving all by itself. Do you guys see that? Have you used any hop terpenes at all? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's hop terpenes in all, even like a Bud Light. You can find some hop terpenes in there because there's hops in there. I meant like terpene factories. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're all in. I mean, because of our location so close to a lot of these cannabis companies that were making the botanical terpenes, we've been friendly with those guys all along. Our new beer Hazicus Maximus, which we didn't bring, we should have brought that one. Is that one? You guys selling Hazicus? Yeah. That's got botanical derived terpenes from things like grapefruits and other things. It's got a lot of terpenes that are like not from hops, that are like extracted. You can't get a hop to make this particular terpene. So it's got the hop terpenes plus all these other weird ones. And that's why it has that like flavor and aroma. So in our mind, it's like a little bit sexier than just putting natural flavors in a beer, which should just be the same thing that's in like a La Croix flavored water. You can take that same flavor and you can just add that to a beer. That feels a little more truth in advertising too, because natural flavoring could be so many things. Oh yeah. Yeah. If you look under the... You can hide whatever you want in that. I think there is an important difference too. And like I'm all about if you can preserve the true essence of a hop via one of these oils, that's a big difference from the joking term that we love to use on here is when breweries like flavor blasted. Yeah. Flavor blasted beers. Yeah. They take these IPAs and then all of a sudden it tastes like you're at the Slurpee machine and oh yeah you know we we did that but we were like well if we're gonna do all that let's just make it red. Yeah. That's where if we're gonna do it let's just overdo it right. That's how a lot of those tastes they taste red. Yeah. Like oh there's seven kinds of fruit in this IPA. Yeah yeah and you know when we make it red of course we do that with carrots so that you can let your wife or significant other know no I'm having carrots right now carrots this is a salad in this can the thing about the terpenes is like a lot of hops are just rich in your scene which is a very delicate fleeting one it's like why a fresh one tastes so fresh and then sits in the bottle and sits around for a few months and then it loses that little edge the mirror scene is like the Houdini that just kind of lets itself out of the bottle somehow or it reacts and turns into other things but hops also have what we call the miners which is like all these other little terpenes in varying amounts and it's really really hard for the extractor people that are making the extracts to bring over all that delicate stuff like a it gets degraded and they lose it entirely or B, they lose the ratio that it had like you know, it might have had this much beta karyophylline, this much beta pionene and this much of the other and then here's the big Mersenne wedge and they say that's what we think this hop was. So then they tear it all down, fractionate it, and then they try to put it back together like Legos, right? And something always gets No sir. Yeah. But it'd be Lego you. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, it's, they're getting better at it. And one day they'll crack it. And then the romanticism of dry hopping will be gone and I'll be sad forever. It's been fun to work with the TTB on this because like they're like, well, you, the only thing we understand is beer with natural flavors. So you just need to call it that. And we're like, but it's not that, you know, it's this. So you kind of have to go to battle a little bit about the word turpene. Because I think they've been poisoned by the fact they think you're trying to add weed. Yeah. To the beer. So you got to kind of say, no, that's not what we're doing. Oh, actually, we did try that. But, you know, not not this time, not trying to pull one. That again, it cracks me up about all the people we've lost in beer to bourbon. It's like the argument about that. We're losing people to weed. It's like, well, you know, there's people at Lagunitas who like to do both. Like, why is it mutually exclusive? Like, you can enjoy both at the same time even. We love to enjoy both. But tell me more. It sounds sad that we've lost people to bourbon. Oh, yeah. It's very bizarre, especially like I think it brought bear. A lot of people wanting rare stuff. So they just wanted rare beer. So now they just want rare whiskey. It's maybe not even the experience or the taste. It's just like the next thing to try to find that other people can't get. Well, scarcity was a big part of what it was all about, right? I'm only going to brew a thimble. I'm going to package it into one underburke bottle, and there'll only be one made, and now I know how much you want it. But that also became a little exclusionary, right? When Craft Beer went that whole, it got too uppity shmuppity. Yeah, and also too fragmented, and when 36 places have a weekly release, then every individual you can't have it really feels a little less special. Yeah. Well, it also became like a packaging thing. Everything had to be bespoke and bedazzled. The boxes got fancy. We would actually use Lagunitas as kind of a litmus of, they put theirs in a six pack, man. It's not precious. It's great, and it's affordable. Roger's like, buy another UPC so that your seasonals aren't all the same price as the cheapest one. I just want to go back to bedazzled. Was there anybody that bedazzled their bottles? Bedazzling? Like the Brewmaster bedazzled it one bottle at a time. And they're all licking stick? There were boxes that were pretty ornate. I made a joke once that said, if we could get this for $10 less, can you keep the box? My favorite was the boxes that self-destructed, because there were certain beers that came in boxes and you had to like tear the little lines and it opened like a flower, but then you didn't have the precious thing anymore. You didn't have it on your shelf, because it kind of, you know, cardboard, it's ephemeral, and then it's gone. It's kind of like Inspector Gadget. Remember, this message will self-destruct. We did have one beer that literally was bedazzled. It didn't quite work out as like they thought, but it had edible glitter in it. Oh, that was when we knew this thing was not going good places today. Because the ingredient suppliers, they hit us first, so we were a little bit ahead of the trends. We would see like, I remember the edible glitter guy came by the brewery and I got everybody together so we could laugh that salesperson away. But then we were like, well, dude, make sure you leave a sample so that you can all eat. We still want to know what it tastes like. What does it taste like? Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Roger's getting his time in pitching stuff. Can I pitch something? He said this once as a joke, my ideal beer style, and maybe nobody would buy this except for me. But hear me out, okay? I'm going to hear you out. Session Barley Wine, right? Oh, I love it. So, looking for an excuse to dust off Gnarly Wine. Yeah. Because it's such a great name. Yes. So, how does that work? It's like a small big beer. It's like seven and a half, eight percent. Okay. And it is hoppy and malty, but it doesn't tear your face off, and it doesn't give you diabetes. Okay. Okay. So, it's like dry, malt forward, slightly hoppy. I'm thinking of like Waldo's dialed down a tiny bit. Like Waldo's where we accidentally got some water in it or some other beer style? Some other beer style. Okay. Yeah, some resinous IPA. Since we don't care about yeast anymore, we could do pills and Waldo's. Why not? Put together. Yeah. Just hear me out on this. Yeah, I like it. I'll think about that. We'll do this just for you. Thank you. You'll have to fly me over to either fly me or a crawler one way or the other. I mean, this is proof we can get a crawler to you in good shape. I love this idea. Yeah. We should keep this going. Yeah. Keep the crawlers going. Yeah. If you want any feedback on any projects, just send them our way. We can call it not so gnarly wine. I don't know. If you come up with a cool name like gnarly wine, which is a great one from the Lagunitas past, back in the days of 22 ounce bombers, the kids gather around, we're going to tell you about when beer came in, something that looked like a wine bottle. Yes. I mean, really what I'd like is to be able to have a quart of sucks. Can we bring that back too? We do hear about that. That was just trouble. Yeah. What was this one? It was a 32-ounce quart bottle of an 8% rye double IPA. Yeah. It was like the juicy hoppy style before that term even existed. But it was a West Coast IPA with those qualities. Yeah. We were dumb enough to buy all the parts to change our bottling line over all those things that you need to get from point A to point B with the 32-ounce quart bottles. What are we drinking right now? Because this is a good beer. And I think we got off topic and didn't talk about it. This is the Yakamopolis. So it would be taking all of the Yakima hops. So we got Citra, Equinox or Ukunat. They renamed it. We got Simcoe, Mosaic, all of them. All the ones grown in the Yakima Valley, to be contrasted with our last final beer. What's the ABV on this? This is pretty easy to drink and I have a feeling it's... 5.7, the Crowell. 5.7. Oh, okay. Very hoppy. I was going to say, it's side by side with the Hazy. It's even more drinkable. It's more drinkable. It's softer and fruitier too. Yeah. Or is that just me? Could just be you. It has more schlarf. It has more schlarf. That's what it is. It's schlarfier. You're right. Yes, that's yeah. I was almost wondering if there was some... It has that Southern Hemisphere kind of feel, but it's not, huh? No. It's got kind of some green grape thing that's funky. I like that. Yep, it does have that. You said you were a big fan of Nelson. Oh yeah, I love it. This is our latest one to go on. So it literally went on tap last week, and now it's here right now, this week. And this is a big old Nelson bomb. So to contrast heavily, I think if we don't have more than one glass, but if you had the ability to kind of switch back and forth. We can have more than one glass. But you would taste the Yakima versus the... And I was in a wonderful debate with a hop farmer about why the hops from the Southern Hemisphere all have that special taste. And he hit me up with this big thing, well, have you ever been to an art museum in New Zealand and seen the light on the paintings? It's the light. This guy told me, it's the light. And then I began looking into it, and there's a hole in the ozone layer that kind of sits over a lot of these hop growing regions. So there's more ozone. And I began thinking, ah, Darren's right, it is the light. But what he didn't know is it's the ozone. And then I got visited by Brent McClassen and Dr. Ron Beetson of Nectar Ron fame, and then found out he bred the Nelson. And I'm like, hey, I got visited by a hop farmer. And he told me the specialness is, it's the light, isn't it? And I went down the whole thing with the paintings and he goes, no, mate, it's the genetics. I just wanted to believe that it was the light and the whole thing about the paintings. But hop farmers are a funny breed. All right, so we're going to this is a clear IPA. And it is about as much of a Nelson bomb as you can get. Oh, good. Yes. You are happy about this. Nelson's been out a lot longer than people realize. Why do you think it took so long? Was it like just there wasn't much enough of it that left New Zealand or it was just too expensive or it was? It was the fact that the San Diego brewers had contracted almost the entire world's supply. OK. And thereby and it was hard to get for the rest. And and then they kind of got wonky as the craft brew thing got got over its skis again, which happened, you know, past four or five years. So now there's there's a supply of Nelson. So they're managing the acres to try to get it right sized. You know, this also has rewaka, which is the world's most expensive hop because it's not only from New Zealand, but it has a very poor agronomic yield. And rewaka is also got a really pungent. It's a really interesting hop in that most of the aroma hops that craft brewers and IPA drinkers like also tend to be relatively high in alpha acid, they'll tend to be a 10, 11, 12, 13 percent alpha acid like all the mosaics, citrus, even Nelson, but rewaka is quite low. It's like a six or a seven percent alpha, but it cranks out all these aromatic compounds. And there's a big almost like scandal about like what is a pure rewaka. And if you let it hang, that means harvest it later, it expresses all of these more pungent diesel compounds. And Nelson, of course, does the same thing, thus the diesel that we talked about. But a lot of IPA brewers find that Nelson and the rewaka, they just go together very well. You're tasting it very firm in this one. They're in like kind of equal amounts, so the Nelson's not overpowering the rewaka. I never picked up on fresh wood shavings in cedar wood until you said that, and now it's like jumping out. And it's almost like super resinous. Yeah, it is. New Zealand hops do a lot to the mouthfeel. We used to call that grippy back in the day, and then say, okay, define grippy. It's kind of like this. That's it. You know, it's like that little thing where it's like forming a resin web on the inside of your cheeks, a little sticky, a little resinous, a little grippy, a little. Maybe people are hesitant to describe hops this way, because when people hear the word pepper, sometimes they think of like hot pepper as opposed to black pepper. But this is like this has that peppery hop character, especially like if you buy the fancy peppercorns that are like the mix of green, pink. Yeah. Yeah. I get some pink peppercorn. This is awesome. Thank you. I knew you'd like it. What a great color too. Oh, yeah. Really deep gold. Deep golden. It's a little bit of some special malts in there. We're using this one from Canada, Tariffs Be Damned, Gambrinas IPA malt. Very popular in our spice rack lately. That's how you get that golden hue. I've seen that in a couple of breweries lately. I was wondering if maybe it's a New Zealand type thing, because I know down there, I guess they're bringing this XPA style, is the new novelty. Firestone did an XPA beer that had a similar really deep golden color. It's just nice to see clear beers again too, after all these years of the haze. I don't know. Yeah. Remember, every action leads to an equal and opposite reaction. Some dead smart guy said that. That's why I got all these huge thing and high-alk, high-octane, nine percent, and all of a sudden non-alk is raging. It's huge. Now you can have non-alk beers that have flavor. It's very true. It is a little bizarre how they're coexisting right now. Then some of the mega geeks are drinking things like British milds that are three percent, but then you have the flavor blasted double IPA that tastes like fruit bunch at 10. Yeah. I wonder how O'Douls is doing. If you could brew a beer tomorrow, I know we've been visiting the past, and you didn't have to worry about the marketing, the packaging, even the sales, you're just making the beer for you and people that love beer. What would you make? Would I have to worry about the brewing? Like you don't have to mess with the rye gunk, with the slurf? I just keep thinking about this beautiful 100 percent oat thing that we did, and how different it was, and how it felt like a new style. But then Brian brewed a lot of these beers, and he brewed some of these beers you're having today too. He was like, but it's such a pain in the ass because it's just harder, and it's way less efficient. But I think it celebrates a lot of the things about craft and why it exists. It's like we didn't exist for efficiency. We didn't exist for scale. So I think there's something really fun about the 100% Oats thing. And I think I'm kind of out there as a vocal champion, trying to get others to do it more and to turn it into maybe even like, we'd know if it really came into being, if it could become its own style on the GABF or something like that. So I've been kind of talking to those guys about, you know, it would have to happen organically and become a thing that lots of other craft brewers are doing. So I tell everybody, like, here's my cheat sheet, here's my notes, I'll send it to you on the do's and don'ts so that you can not go into it blind like we did. I think it's kind of cool because it's a totally different, they even age differently. They drink differently. And there hasn't ever been much celebration about grain. You know, we've been lamenting about the lack of malts and things like that. And nobody gets excited by grain. It's very important. That needs to change. And I think it's going to be brewers are the ones that, you know, we don't have the same kind of voices like we used to. There isn't Michael Jackson, you know, going out and trying to get people excited. People aren't reading books about beer like they used to. So I think it's really kind of short digestible. You have a pretty funny, great video series I've always enjoyed that I think is really well put together. But again, even in those, you know, I get it. Hops are cool. So you talk a lot about hops. But, you know, seeing some breweries talk about, you know, maltsters and talking about malt again is going to be part of the process to get people to care about it. All that I knew is when I was in brew school, if anything went wrong with our brewing, we were told to blame the maltster. I'm like, already they're the redheaded stepchild, right? Blame the maltster for every mistake you made. But, you know, it is, like I said, beer is in a state of flux, and there's only so much excitement that is out there. And I think keeping it accessible, not getting too weird and inaccessible, and using things that people can kind of relate to, keeping it open, keeping it priced right. And given the styles that are, it does need to be somewhat refreshing, right? I mean, it can't be like tilting back a paint bucket, although there is a place for those beers, right? Yeah. I mean, it's worth mentioning too, like as much as we're kind of poking fun at some of the hazy stuff, you guys made some extreme beers that we really did like, that you can't really dome old gnarly wine or brown sugar or hairy eyeball. I mean, they're big beers. They're big beers and they always were. But I do think that kind of missing out on that balance is something that would be cool to see again. You guys did participate in the good old IBU wars, which kind of started this pendulum swing into the Slop. It's things like Hop Stupid. How better can you go? Yeah. Like 100 plus I.B.U.s kind of, I think got us to the the schlarfy Slop. We set the stage for the New England side to do delicate things with lower B.U.s. And then, you know, it was inevitable if you look at like, just like a blue moon, right? It's a beer that gets all of that haze naturally from the grain bill and from the yeast. You could have predicted that was going to merge with like a refreshing kind of IPA thing, that that was going to happen. But I still remember when I first moved to California, no craft brewers could afford a filter. And a lot of the beers look like the hazies of today, at back in early 2000, because nobody had a filter and nobody could figure it out, and nobody wanted to mess with it. So there was a lot of schlarf getting bottled back then. And it was definitely bottled because this was before the can thing. There any beer styles that you've ever pitched that got vetoed? Beer styles? Yeah, or like you wanted to do a project you wanted to do, and people said, you know, nope. I mean, back when like it felt like anything that you did, people would be a fan of after Hop Stupid. We started the foray into the sours. We did the Dark Swan and the Cherry Jane, and those were lovely beers. I said, it sounds like, you know, if we just did a fruity pebble IPA, that that would people would go go nuts for that. And they were like, OK, this is the dumbest idea. What would you call it? Oh, fruit stupid, of course. F-R-O-O-T. And what would it have? And I just named all the fruits. I was like lemons, limes, oranges, mandarins, clementines, cherries, pears, oranges, you know, until I got through like, you know, 35 different fruits. And then the response was, no, we're not going to do that. And I was like, well, I did pitch a ludicrous idea with the dumb name and it was all, but at that time, I mean, we're talking 2011 when Hop Stupid was having a pretty good run. It was a pretty big brand. I mean, you know, it might have worked. There are now breweries that have IPAs all devoted to adding fruit to them. Well, it's funny you say Fruity Pebbles because that's how a lot of people describe Centennial Hops, right? Yeah, yeah. And a little bubble gum. Here, one of the things that's kind of taken off a little bit, you know, we've been saying it's going to be the summer lager for the last 15 years, but. I know, I know. One day, the lager is going to make its comeback. Are you making money lagers? Like, do you guys do a from a seasonal standpoint, talking about malt, like Oktoberfest season always gets people excited. And apparently, Oktoberfest season starts now, even though it's 95 out. We have we have maritzins on our shelves already. Do you guys do? Oh, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this, because just yesterday I confirmed my raw ingredient. Oktoberfest is, of course, in September in Germany. And it's a it's a big deal to celebrate the coming of the harvest, which is, you know, kind of almost a pagan kind of thing, right? It's like deals with the humans becoming agricultural creatures. It's got us where we are today, because without agriculture, we'd be nomads. And sometimes it's fun to be nomadic, but only if you're had a few beers, I guess. But a long ramble. We do a Lagunfest beer using a byproduct of wheat. And it's not the wheat that's in little something. It's for stone milling raw wheat to make bread flour. And they have all this waste. And we were there and we were like, what do you do with that? Well, we just compost it. And we were like, that's like pure. They call it midlings. And it's like in the middle. It's between the bran and the good starchy part that they want to make flour with. So we took the midlings and we brewed this beer called Lagunfest, which is a traditional lager, no crazy zealous hopping, no dry hopping. And we loggered it proper, gave it like two months in the tank. And it's not super high octane. And the midlings just gave it this beautiful color and flavor, almost like fresh baked bread, kind of slight sweet, slight bready. Or we were like, oh, is the lager yeast doing that? Cause the lager yeast is kind of bready, you know, hints of green apples. You know, it's kind of, it's hard to describe lager yeast without mentioning bread and apples. And then sometimes even sulfury, but you mean like good kind of sulfury, right? Not like bad, not sewer stench, but like, you know. And then we been gradually increasing the amount of that, cause it's a flower. So we're like waiting to see when it's gonna gum everything up and then we don't get a brew out of it. So we like doubled it and then we doubled it again. And I'm gonna double it again this year. This year, Lagunas Fest is gonna be a two-day ticketed event and we're gonna brew like, like four brews of it. Like, like, that could be like four tanks, you know. And we're gonna double the amount of these midlings. I think it's really cool too, because it tells a sustainability story that's not bullsh**. Like we really are taking something that is worth nothing to someone and we're turning it into liquid gold. And I'm like super excited about that because if the world's gonna continue to go, it's gonna be all about combing waste streams everywhere and finding the gold. I mean, people already do this. I'm not saying nobody does it. Everybody, this is a huge industry. But like for the brewers to do this, I think it's better than just finding more sustainable grains. Other than barley, there's like, you know, the whole kernza and phonio thing. There's that. But you know, if it's coming all the way from Africa, like that's... Like I'm just driving down the street and getting this stuff. It's literally seven miles away. Then I dump it right into the beer and it has tons of fermentable extract. It makes a great lager. It's a cool story and everybody wins. It's cool for them. It's cool for us. When you say you're going to double it, does that... That's going to affect the ABV then? Like, is it slowly turning into a bigger and bigger beer? As I add the wheat middlings, I remove barley. Oh, okay. I'm literally also making the beer for a cheaper cost. I mean, at some point, I won't get a beer out of it. Then it's 100% lost. So I'm still going to Vegas, baby. Nice. And there's no potato reference in the name to confuse the shit out of people. Oh, man. Tuberfest, do you guys remember that one? That is one of the most company-hated beers. We did the Tuberfest and we brewed it with potatoes. And it just bombed. I mean, it was a good, okay beer. I mean... Yeah, it was fine. I enjoyed it. We just made way too much of it. And then it lingered around. That was like the first one that we did that was like, well, they can't all be bangers. I don't know what we were thinking. Just been sitting here drinking. I'm just glad you mentioned Tuberfest. Like, you can mention Tuberfest at the brewery and anyone who's worked there a long time will instantly be angry. Make more beers like this Lupelin Affair, please. You like that? Yeah. You're a Nelson and you like the world's most expensive hops. So I would prefer it to be like Cascade and Citra and Galaxy if I'm making my dream beer. But this has the balance of resinous breadth and punchy hop presence at the same time that I love. Oh, thanks. That's a huge compliment. Designed a beer for you that's not a 7.5% gnarly wine. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. It just goes to show you that like when beers bring something a little different, it's cool to see when people move a little bit out of what they think they like. It can get a little tiring to just see like, well, they only like this and then maybe not. You can like multiple styles. If something happened in the beer world or it's like, I only drink hazy. Or like, I only like big resinous. It doesn't have to be that way. Well, as much as old guys like me can knock the hazy thing and say, I only want clear IPA, it is very cool that the hazy thing unlocked the fruit potential of hops to a whole lot of people that didn't even like hops. For sure. Yeah, and hazy's appeal more to women or so the research says. But I don't know if it's true or not, but craft beer did tend to over index with a typical 21 to 40-year-old male who only drank West Coast IPA that was bitter. Back to the Bitterness Wars, and then now you had this delicate fruity pineapple, passion fruit, oranges, and Valencia, all that thing coming out. Then now you have people that are like, hey, I like hops. I didn't even know I like hops. Well, your video series, again, which people should check out, I think has benefited from that. As much as I love old school craft, old school hops were pretty much a pretty limited palette of grapefruit and pine. Those are really the main things you were working with. The descriptors now are, it's almost endless. Well, you mentioned Cascade. I mean, that was like the original craft brew hop when it came out. It was like, wow, like geraniums and grapefruits and all these. There was no hop had ever been like that. That's crazy by today's standards holding up next to a Citra or a Crush or a Nelson, Cascade is relatively tame. Yeah, it seems basic. Yeah, it seems very basic. It tastes like beer. It tastes like beer. Yeah. My dad drinks grapefruit. Yeah. Well, hey Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us about beer and for sharing these beers. I think they're all just more evidence of that Lagunitas has brewing some of the best beer out there. We tried to avoid being the Chris Farley show and saying, hey, remember when you brewed that beer, that was awesome. He didn't try to avoid doing that at all. No, he didn't try at all, not even a tiny bit. That's good. I would have laughed. Couldn't help it. Bring back some of those awesome beers, but clearly, you're still making some awesome innovation, so keep at it. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. I can talk about beer all day and so can you, and I love it. That's it for this episode of Barrel to Bottle. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed what you heard, please leave a review for us. Until next week, I'm Roger. I'm Greg. I'm Lexi. I'm Jeremy. You say keep tasting. Oh, I didn't know that part. Okay, let's take it from the top again. No, he's going to edit it. No, let's take it from the top. Well, I never said keep tasting. You just did. Keep tasting.