Lagunitas Brewing from California is probably one of my favourite breweries, their core range ‘IPA’ and session IPA ‘Daytime’ are always a go to when doing our supermarket shop with Daytime being for me the most consistently good session IPA readily available in the UK
That’s all from Lagunitas we tend to get in the UK currently, I’ve enjoyed some of their other variants while traveling in the US and to be honest have yet to drink a bad beer from them so when I managed to get hold of a couple of bottles of their Seasonal Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale just in time for Christmas I was more than a bit excited.
So I guess the first question is why is it called Lagunitas Sucks? – Well in 2010 Lagunitas first brewed their Holiday beer called ‘Brown Shugga’ which was a wild success, drinkers demanded its return so they again in 2011 went about a brew of the beer for the holiday season but things didn’t totally go to plan. Due to the breweries massive growth that year they couldn’t afford the time in the tanks needed to produce the original beer so admitting they sucked came up with this beer in its place. The results were so well received that now it’s a permanent fixture brewed every year since.
Upon opening the double ipa has a quite lively dark golden brown in appearance, quite sweet almost honey like and a much more hoppy taste compared to their regular IPA with a slight pine aftertaste that lingers. This beer feels very Christmassy and a really nice change from the abundance of dark Christmas ales that we tend to get around this time.
But the big question is does Lagunitas suck? , certainly not when they keep producing beers like this, I just hope we see more of them make it over to the UK in the future.
Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale is available in the UK in very limited quantities so if you see some I highly recommend you grab a bottle, thankfully though IPA and Daytime are widely available in most national supermarkets now.