Beer of the Week! 03/25/24

Lost Generation There Will Always Be Hops V5

Normally $17.99 / Now on Sale for $16.96
American IPA

Almost 20 years ago, Jared Pulliam started homebrewing with a buddy. Being big fans of the Lagunitas Hop Stoopid, they decided to give it a shot. Brew what you love, right? After hitting Google to guess at the recipe, they made their attempt. The result, as Pulliam tells it, was lamentable. “We dumped all of it down the drain. It was just completely undrinkable.”

Lamentable … but inspiring. Pulliam was spurred by his failure to become better, and better he got. Eventually he was working at a D.C. brewing company, a job that he held simultaneously with his job as a high school teacher until his wife, Anne Choe, said he’d have to choose one or the other. She then suggested that Pulliam choose beer even though it was the less stable, less sure choice. So, Pulliam wrote down his origin story and sent it to, get this … Lagunitas, and, get this … they gave him a job!

After some time with with one of their (and our) favorite California hop heads, he and Choe moved back to D.C. and opened Lost Generation Brewing in 2022. How’s that for co-opting your failures?

Pullium calls the There Will Always Be Hops Series a series of hybrid or bi-coastal IPAs. Not hazy or juicy, it’s got the cleanness of a West Coast Style IPA, but it doesn’t stick to its usual hop suspects, and the hops change with each version. Version Five — what we have here — features a combination of the West Coast’s Simcoe and New Zealand’s Nelson Sauvin with its white wine grape flavors.

Version five of the There Will Always be Hops is a slow burn. It’s not a brew that hits you with its greatness in its first gulp but sneaks up on you with how good it is. (Except for the aroma — that’s clear right up front, taking full advantage of Nelson Sauvin’s aromatic nature.) We get a collection of flavors quietly swimming around in this brew, from fresh papaya and satsuma to aspen sawdust to almond, all working together in a clean, elegant gestalt.

It ain’t the Hop Stoopid, but we’re stoopid in love with what they’ve done with these malts and hops!