Well OK, there’s a slap to the back of your neck if you were in the race to be Hoppier Than Thou. Taking a different tack than their neighbors at Sierra Nevada, these folks at Lagunitas are messing around with hop extractives and adding that to the beer instead. And the result, in case you’re not puckered enough today, is an astounding 102 International Bitterness Units. One hundred and two. Yes. I didn’t even know the scale went over 100.
And just to keep all them IBU’s under control, the alk has to be high, in this case 8%. So now you know, why they call it Hop Stoopid. The blurb on the bottles says it’s “fermented on high” and yeah, that’s probably true too.
The beer itself? Good golden color with plenty of floaty things in there, which is a mystery, because the whole story (in tiny print on the side of the label) is about NOT using a mountain of actual leafy buddy hop cones so they don’t jam your equips when you get it out of the vat, like a sodden roof gutter in November.
The taste is pretty excellent, as i suspected it would be. Lagunitas is one of those breweries whose stuff is just too expensive for me, like $15 sixers and $24 12-packs, but i saw “102 IBU 4U” on the label and knew i had to splurge on a 22-oz jammer of this, lovingly known among the drinking class as a “double deuce”. But my regular glass is 18-oz so i can handle these things. Yes it’s a lager glass, that trapezoidal profile, but it’s fine for all beers and gives me an excuse to say trapezoidal once in a while.
The beer body is finely sturdy, this is an ale but not a pale ale, a good blend of malt-sweet and crunchy cereals. Professional head on this one, like Euro-style head on the beer, and then, of course, there’s all those devilish IBU’s. It’s hoppy, mi amigo. Like Jumpin’ Jesus on a Pogo Stick, it’s hoppy. Like a kangaroo on crack-a-roo, it’s hopping all over the goddamned place. I like it.
The hops are velvety brutal, carried on that big-beer taste and couched in a hi-alk delivery vehicle. A hammer of hops, truth told here for free. But nuttily enough this is not the Hoppiest of the Hopalongs on the range. Sierra Nevada’s Hop Hunter still reigns, even though i had prepared myself for the possibility that Hop Stoopid might dethrone the Hunter.
But it was not to be. The Double-H’s fresh-hop steam extraction turns out to be superior to whatever the Lagunitas Method is for making hop extract. I think the real difference might be Sierra Nevada’s HH uses the extract, and then makes hoppy beer as usual, only then they add the extract too. It seems like Lagunitas lets the extract do more of the work for them.
I think the Stoopid earns a rating of 8.8 for good tries at sooper hop, because the windmill is there, that’s why. But there are better hoppy beers at a lower price point than Lagunitas in this category, so that makes me less inclined to try another Lagunitas label in the future. Granted, what i had was likely brewed in Chicago, not in California, so maybe the quality stepped down at the contract brewery. Dunno, it’s not my job to know.