Culture
Lagunitas & AbsoluteXtracts Announce New Pot Infused Beer
Two new products will bring together cannabis and craft brew.
Two of Sonoma County’s most famous companies (that aren’t making wine) have teamed up to create cannabis terpene infused beer and hop terpene infused cannabis cartridges.
Lagunitas Brewing Company from Petaluma, California has joined forces with the always popular AbsoluteXtracts to create the world’s first cannabis vape cartridge infused with hop terpenes and a slightly less progressive, but still first wave, THC-free beer flavored with cannabis terpenes. The new collaboration is cleverly named “SuperCritical” after the CO2 extraction method that isolates and preserves the cannabis and hops terpenes being used in the two mixtures.
In a statement released last week, the two companies noted the SuperCritical Ale is brewed with seven hop strains and cannabis terpenes from the strains Blue Dream and Girl Scout Cookies.
The beer’s companion cartridge series will feature a 500 mg cartridge filled with cannabis distillate oil, the same hops that give Lagunitas its now famous kick will spice things up exceptionally. The AbsoluteXtracts oil has long been among the top in the game. Back in the day O’Shaughnessy’s, the journal of cannabis in clinical practice, tested a wide spread of the industries leading brands. When the testing results were published, AbsoluteXtracts came in both second and third place for the purest oil of the 19 tested.
According to the two companies, the collaboration is the product of their shared ethos — commitment to quality, customers, community and innovation, as well as a fond appreciation for one another’s product. They believe this also to be a natural fit given that both companies are the forefront of their respective industries in which both continue to see rapid growth. Lagunitas Brewing Company has been at the top of the craft beer food chain for years and is the fifth largest craft brewery in the U.S. AbsoluteXtracts is among the original and largest vertically integrated operations in the state of California, a true soil to oil outfit.
“We’ve always noticed a lot of similarities between our industries and we wanted to see what we could come up with if we started brainstorming together,” Lagunitas Director of Communications Karen Hamilton said in a statement.
AbsoluteXtracts is under the umbrella of CannaCraft. According to CannaCraft’s CEO, Ned Fussell, the company wasn’t just looking for a brewery partner that could pour some mean suds, but also one that would be able to take a little heat.
“When we first started thinking about partnering with a brewery we wanted to work with people who love what they do and take as much pride in their finished product as we do,” Fussell said. “We also knew this could be controversial so we needed to find a partner that was comfortable exploring this new territory with us.”
According to Kial Long, vice president of marketing at CannaCraft, it was pretty obvious Lagunitas was the way to go once they decided to go with the hops and terps theme.
“When we decided to move forward with this it was a natural choice to choose Lagunitas and when we approached them they had been thinking the same thing,” said Long. “Terpenes and beers.”
AbsoluteXtracts gave Lagunitas a spread of terpenes to choose from. They decided on the Girl Scout Cookies and Blue Dream.
“We just put together all these terpene profiles and let the brewmasters taste test them one at a time for what they thought would work best and what would be the most natural fit with their flavor profiles,” Long said.
The first run of kegs was 100 and they’re basically all gone. Lagunitas did a limited distribution of about 60 locations that have their products on tap.
The companies have been working on the project for many months, over the past few they’ve dialed the products in with taste tests. A soft launch for the cartridges will begin in a couple of weeks and they will hit dispensaries in the rest of California in about a month.
TELL US, would you try a vape pen infused with hops?
