Lagunitas Brewing Company Born Again Yesterday, a 7.2% ABV Unfiltered Ale
| Appearance | Hazy yellow-orange with thin white head. |
| Aroma | Hops. Tropical fruit, citrus, pine… |
| Taste | Hops dominate. A pleasant spicy malt note cleans up the palate. |
| Mouthfeel | Medium body. Moderate carbonation. |
| Overall | Hop heads rejoice! |
Lagunitas Brewing Company was founded by Tony Magee in 1993 in Lagunitas, CA. A year later, Lagunitas had already outgrew the space and moved to Petaluma, CA.
Known for modern interpretations of traditional styles and sarcastic descriptions and stories on bottles, Lagunitas has increased production at a jaw-dropping rate over the past decade. In 2004, annual production was 27,000 barrels. That increased to 106,000 barrels annually by 2010. The brewery began a major expansion in 2012, pushing output to 360,000 barrels annually.
Lagunitas opened an additional brewery and taproom in Chicago, IL (Tony Magee is a Chicago native) in 2014 and became the largest brewery in Chicago, surpassing Goose Island. The 300,000 square foot facility was formerly a steel plant and briefly served as a TV/film set. The 250 barrel brewhouse is capable of producing over 250,000 barrels annually.
In 2015 Lagunitas announced that a third production brewery in Azusa, CA. Located just outside of Los Angeles (Tony Magee lived in L.A. for 12 years), the 178,000 square foot facility has an annual capacity of about 420,000 barrels, becoming the largest brewery in L.A. County. The built-out capacity for the space is 1 million barrels. The new brewery opened in 2017.
When describing Born Again Yesterday, Lagunitas explains…
It’s the Holy Grail pursuit of brewing in hoppy beer making: year-round wet-hop flavor. Hops are good, fresh hops are better, wet hops are the best. We say ‘wet hops’ because they have not been dried after harvest. We say ‘better’ because they possess the fullest expression of hop flavor; vine-fresh. But as with another herbaceous favorite of ours, they must be quickly dried to prevent mold and spoilage. That drying process is done delicately but something is always lost in translation. Other good brewers have taken up the quest. The results have varied. Ours is a homegrown process of time dilation for the delicate hop cone that the flower doesn’t even perceive and so delivers its still newborn self to our kettle months and months after its birth. Questing has no end and we are still tweaking our process but we hope you find this mid-summer anachronism to be as satisfying as we do. If you dig it, enjoy it. We’ll make more!
MORE ABOUT THE FREAKIN’ WET HOPS: To figure out this brand new wet hop preservation process, we had to forget everything that we already knew about how hops are processed and preserved. We tried 5 or 6 different things to try and achieve this process (some of which failed miserably), then we discovered a relatively simple process that deliberately did all the things that the textbooks told us not to do. This new proprietary process involves a lot of time and money, and even more thinking about hops and freshness in new ways. From all of this, we found a brand-spankin’-new way to preserve the hops, fresh from the Yakima Valley trellises, first born during harvest season into the Born Yesterday last fall, and reborn into this scary new next step, the Born Again Yesterday Pale Ale, six months later, to the beer in your hands today.
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Check out… this video from Lagunitas about Born Again Yesterday.
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