Tastes like Juicy Fruit™ (Lagunitas Brown Shugga)

Well, it is the time of year when barleywines---also known as barley wines, barley-wines, strong ales, old ales, stock ales, Burton ales, and probably a few others too---start getting released.  These are strong, typically 10% or higher (hence being “wine-strength”); and they are typically malted entirely with barley, no rye or oats or corn or wheat; hence, barleywine.  They may be sticky-sweet from all the malt or intensely bitter from a generous helping of hops, or somewhere in-between.  Most can be aged like wine (I’ve done this before to mostly-good effect).  Most are somewhere between a light red and a deep brown.

Lagunitas Brown Shugga’ might be categorized as an “American Adjunct Barleywine.”  It meets pretty much every metric of a barleywine, with the exception that it is fermented with a lot of brown sugar (in brewing terms, an adjunct).  According to the company, the beer actually came about because they screwed up a batch of Lagunitas Gnarlywine.

It looks pretty much par for a hoppy American barleywine, semi-bright red with just over two fingers of white foam topping it off.  The foam has excellent staying power and leaves plenty of lace caked to the glass.

I first had this a month ago and the smell really threw me off.  Or rather, the combination of the smell and beer’s name threw me off.  Does this beer smell sweet?  Yes.  Does is smell like brown sugar?  No, not even close.  It smells very hoppy; not the bitter, sucking-on-a-pine-cone hoppy but more of the tropical fruit-y hop aroma.  Some grapefruit, some mango; pretty appetizing.  After getting over the “where is the brown sugar,” my first thought was this smells a bit like Juicy Fruit™.  I like Juicy Fruit™.

The taste pretty much follows the nose.  A lot of mangos, some tangerine, honeyed malt, slight pine bitterness, and more Juicy Fruit™.  Like I said, this is firmly in the sweet spectrum of beers and definitely full-bodied, but at least this fresh I wouldn’t say it tastes like brown sugar at all.  Hops are generally one of the first things that fade with age, so maybe the bottle I have in the basement will taste more like the name once that wears off.

A very solid A-offering here and one of the few barleywines that is truly outstanding fresh.  So much so that I wonder if it will taste worse once the Juicy Fruit™ hops go away.