Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout

Browsing my Beer Madness review history reveals that I have written about painfully few full bodied/dark beers during my tenure here. I actually love the taste of stouts and their ilk, but I also love to knock down 4+ beers in a sitting and doing that with a heavy bodied brew just doesn't sit well with my stomach. For lunch today I indulged a rare splurge on the Pig & Fig sandwich at hoity-toity Chicago food store Pastoral. While waiting for them to spread the black tea and fig chutney on my french bread I spotted this Lagunitas seasonal on the shelf and made an impulse buy.

I now know that this impulse buy was actually a wise, considered investment. The Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout is one of the finest beers I've had the pleasure of tasting. Its coffee base ensures that it is both bright and bitter like a good cup should be. It gives off a sense of richness without tasting saccharine, like a good bar of dark chocolate, which by the way is another flavor this beer evokes. The texture is silky smooth without being overly heavy or syrupy. I didn't have great expectations when I purchased this because I've consumed some truly stank coffee flavored beers over the last couple of years. I should have known I could trust the curatorial tongues of Pastoral.

Lagunitas Brown Shugga'

'Tis the season to drink high ABV barleywines and stouts! Though Lagunitas' "Brown Shugga'" Ale is neither (although it is apparently the result of a failed batch of Lagunitas' barleywine "Old Gnarleywine"), it's 9.99% ABV and limited seasonal availability make it a fitting beer for the times.

The bottle vaguely describes the brewing process by stating, "Feeding Brown Cane Sugar to otherwise Cultured Brewery Yeast is a'kin to feeding Raw Shark to your Gerbil." My experience with other alcoholic beverages brewed with raw cane sugar has been very mixed. Chicha, one of the most popular traditional drinks in Nicaragua, is made by adding bricks of unrefined brown sugar each day to feed wild yeast strains in a 5-gallon bucket of water and sprouted corn to yield a highly alcoholic "Chicha Bruja," or "witch's chicha." Some batches of chicha bruja are sweet, smooth, and fruity. Some batches taste like thick corn alcohol and give you the shits for two days after drinking just 8 ounces. Thankfully, the results of enjoying a 12 ounce bottle of Brown Shugga' are not the same.

Brown Shugga' is, as the name might suggest, very sweet. It isn't sweet like a malty stout. It is sweet like an apricot tart that had an extra cup of sugar accidentally dumped into the baking pan that caramelized all over the treat. The 10% ABV lingers quietly, but unmistakably behind the sugary sweetness. Not surprisingly given its origins, the grain palate is almost identical to a barleywine. Yep, Brown Shugga' is basically a super-sweet, caramely barleywine. A 6-pack will run about $10, but is a great way to get socially awkward crowds to open up a little bit.

Lagunitas Hop Stoopid Ale

Any respectable west coast brewery needs a put-some-hair-on-your-chest super-hopped ale. Most of these IPAs brag about the ludicrous amount of hops used in each batch to boost the International Bittering Units measurement to 100 or above. The Hop Stoopid Ale from Lagunitas follows suit by serving up a double IPA with 102 IBUs and 8% ABV. But wait, where is the description of the 400 pounds of Chinook hops used per batch??? Instead of loading down the brew with hop cones, the folks at Lagunitas took a tip from the big macrobrewers and doused the Hop Stoopid Ale with hop extracts. I can't claim that my palate is refined enough to tell the difference without the aid of the text on the bottle. However, this double IPA seems a bit too smooth, a bit less earthy-tasting, and with a bit too much of a concentrated lip-puckering bitterness to be the product of a natural hop infusion. The subtle floral and fruity notes that are present in the other big west coast IPAs are largely absent, replaced with a generically sweet malt finish. Not bad for a $4.50 bomber, but both Lagunitas and the hop-addict can do better than the Hop Stoopid Ale.

Pairs well with Turbos Flamas chips by Sabritas.