8.6

Lagunitas Born Yesterday

Drink Reviews Lagunitas
Lagunitas Born Yesterday

Here’s the deal with this beer. Lagunitas brews it, using a sh*! ton of fresh picked hops, then ships it out within 24 hours of being bottled. The idea is to get a hop-centric beer out to the public as quickly as possible so we can all experience just how magical those hops are when they’re super duper fresh.

I explained all this to my wife, how Lagunitas used 11 pounds of hops per barrel, how they brewed it and bottled it super fast and sent it to me the day after it was bottled and she said, “wow.” Except she said it sarcastically, because she doesn’t give a shit.

That’s the rub with projects like this—you either geek out over the idea, or you don’t care at all. Fresh hop beers with limited shelf lives are all the rage right now (see our article on Stone Brewing Co.’s Enjoy By series) and Born Yesterday is Lagunitas’ entry into the style, introduced for the first time last year. It’s basically a supped up version of their New Dogtown Pale. Lagunitas loaded the pale with Mosaic, Equinox, Simcoe and Citra hops. In the words of McLovin, from Superbad, “I heard they recently decided to add more hops to it.”

The beer pours a light orange with a healthy white head that sticks around for a while. It has a hell of a nose, all zesty with notes of pepper, grass and lots of fresh orange. It’s truly aromatic, which is probably one of the greatest benefits of popping open a super fresh hop-centric beer. And I can’t stress the “hop-centric” aspect of Born Yesterday enough. It has a thin mouthfeel that’s full of zesty, almost electric notes along with a slight fruit cup sweetness—the kind my daughter likes me to put in her lunch box every day. And all of that is washed over by a wave of bitter grapefruit that takes over on the tail end of the sip.

Damn, is it cheesy to say this beer tastes fresh?

This is one of those pale ales that could really be considered an IPA, because it’s zesty as hell and there really isn’t a lot of malt anything going on here. But that makes sense—the hops are supposed to steal the show here. And they do, from the nose to the finish, Born Yesterday is all about the hops.

Born Yesterday hit the shelves this week in six packs, and obviously, this beer isn’t gonna last long on the shelves.

Brewery: Lagunitas
City: Petaluma, California
Style: Pale Ale
ABV: 6.5%
Availability Limited in six packs of bottles

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