Get to know your beer: Anniversary Double IPA

You may have read the title of this blog and scratched your head…. "Alesong Double IPA??  That doesn’t sound right!  Did these guys give up on the barrel-aged and farmhouse angle??  Are they an IPA brewery now??  WTF?! I guess it was bound to happen eventually…"

Well, the short answer to all those questions is no!  We’re still focused on barrel-aged and farmhouse styles.  No we’re not making an IPA year round, and no we didn’t buy a canning line...  But!  We do love IPAs and we like to have a little fun too!

Our one year anniversary was coming up and, as you do in the beer world, we wanted to come up with a cool anniversary beer to celebrate… In this industry, though, everyone usually makes some sort of special, barrel-aged creation, and we kept struggling with that starting point.  We couldn’t come up with anything that felt right because we put all of our “special, barrel-aged” ideas into our normal production cycle and it just didn’t seem unique and celebratory enough for our anniversary.  So we decided it needed to be something different, something out of character for us, and something fun. 

We tossed around a few ideas and after some serious debate we eventually decided that a double IPA in cans would be awesome (narrowly beating out an American Light Lager in 40s)!  Primarily because it’s a style we love, but also because it’s a little “off brand” and fun for us as a one-off anniversary release.  And since it’s just one batch for the anniversary and we don’t normally make a lot of hoppy beers, we really went for it on the ingredients, using all of the most awesome hops (and extract, and lupulin powder) we could get our hands on! 

Anyway, this was a super fun project for us and a beer we’re thrilled with.  I can say that each time we’ve tasted it, we’ve had to really show some discipline to not keep nudging up our "founder allocations" and drinking all of it ourselves!  We hope you enjoy it with us out on the patio of our new brewery and on a few of your other summer adventures. And maybe if you guys like it as much as we do, we’ll make it again next year!

Cheers and happy birthday to Alesong!!