Lagunitas Brewing Releases CitruSinensis Pale Ale

Lagunitas Brewing begins the year with its first beer in its 2017 One Hit Series with its CitruSinensis Pale Ale. Available now through March 2017 in both 12 oz. bottles and on draft, CitruSinensis Pale Ale is brewed is a hop forward beer that is brewed with natural blood orange flavors.

Though labeled as a Pale Ale, CitruSinensis Pale Ale is more like an IPA or at least would be better labeled as an Imperial Pale Ale as this beer sits at a whopping 7.7% ABV.

In brewing this beer, Lagunitas based it on a version of its New Dogtown Pale Ale but with using more wheat. After juicing ups fresh Sanguinello blood oranges, Lagunitas concentrated this juice without heating it and blended it into the base beer. The result is a heavily hopped beer with blood orange notes that are not over-powering. These notes are faint up front but linger a bit later on.

CitruSinensis Pale Ale Stats:
ABV 7.7%
O.G. 1.071
IBU 49

We will leave you with label wisdom from Tony Magee…

The man bent over his guitar, a shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.’ And they said then, ‘But play, you must, a tune beyond us, yet ourselves, a tune upon the blue guitar of things exactly as they are.’ He sighs, I cannot bring a world quite round, although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero’s head, large eye and bearded bronze, but not a man, although I patch him as I can and reach through him almost to man. If to serenade almost to man is to miss, by that, things as they are, say it is the serenade of a man that plays a blue guitar…” These, the words of the Conjurer-in-Chief; Wallace Stevens, describe in perfect detail the work of a brewer as he sits to write a new recipe. Perfection is the goal, to fill a desire for a perfect beer. Yet the instrument of his mind and that of the brewhouse and yeast are the fallible tools at hand. And so he patches it as he can. A little hop here, a little citrus there, a yeast to marry the two, the worty substrate of reality calling the key and time signature. The beer that comes will be the beer we drink, the beer whose story we will tell here. The brewer does what he can and imagines a world quite round. Conjurer-in-Chief Stevens concludes; “Exceeding music must take the place of empty heaven and its hymns.” What does it all have to do with beer?