![\"Beer](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/sponsor_botw_whitelabs-1024x258.png\")
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Having worked for breweries, I\u2019ve been privy to conversations wherein brewers talk about recipe-formulation for new beers. As one would expect, they do so with great purpose. Everybody wants to make the best beer possible. That said, the brewers I\u2019ve interloped on seemed to apply the most concentration to IPA recipes. In a town fueled by golden-hued, hop-infused goodness, it takes a lot for an individual brewery\u2019s IPA to stand out, so it makes sense that fermentationists would spend a great deal of time and energy putting together a hop bill for one. Contrary to popular belief, it\u2019s not as simple as throwing in money varietals like Nelson, Mosaic, Strata, Citra and Krush. (Say, whatever happened to Galaxy?) Sure, those are the hops most craft-beer drinkers want, and it\u2019s tempting to fixate on them, but so much can be achieved by fighting that urge and even, dare I say, winging it a bit. Case in point, this week\u2019s featured beer, Shasta<\/strong>. Named for the California mountain of the same moniker, this West Coast IPA is the first from San Marcos\u2019 Michi Brew Co.<\/strong><\/a> to make it into a can. It wasn\u2019t the beer owner and Head Brewer Cody Gagnon<\/strong> expected to be his first packaged creation, but his regulars loved it so much that it was a no-brainer. This, despite the fact that, of all the IPAs he\u2019s created in Michi\u2019s first six months in business, Shasta features the most unorthodox hop bill; a m\u00e9lange of varietals hailing from Germany, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest. Shasta smells of citrus and pine, following up on the taste buds with flavors of pineapple and orange with a lingering hint of white-wine. It\u2019s a sensory cornucopia (happy Thanksgiving) resulting from a little of this and a little of that, and everything pops against a barely-there malt bill reminiscent of an extra pale ale. As you\u2019ll see below, this beer was really more a product of necessity than anything else. Regardless, Shasta goes to show that experimenting with and beyond cheater hops can pay off. Just ask Michi\u2019s regulars!<\/p>\n Shasta is a double dry-hopped West Coast IPA. It was the fifth out of six such IPAs that we brewed. I had a ton of leftover hops in our cold-box that needed to be used, so I put together a recipe that I would probably never set out to brew, but I really didn\u2019t want to buy any more hops. Go figure. It was easily the most popular West Coast IPA we\u2019ve done. It has a super soft water profile to keep everything very round and smooth and an absolutely insane amount of flavor. Naturally, it was the first IPA we canned, and I\u2019m really stoked with how the artwork\u00a0turned out.\u00a0Shasta will hopefully be one of our core beers moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n Cody Gagnon, Owner & Head Brewer, Michi Brew Co.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michi Brew Co. is located at 1801 Diamond Drive, #101 in San Marcos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having worked for breweries, I\u2019ve been privy to conversations wherein brewers talk about recipe-formulation for new beers. As…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":410747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,7738,134901,116581,22127,1582,276,132420,132421,193210,635,3549,48789,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-410746","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-beer","10":"tag-beer-of-the-week","11":"tag-brandon-hernandez","12":"tag-brewery","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-california","15":"tag-hops","16":"tag-ipa","17":"tag-michi-brew","18":"tag-new","19":"tag-san-diego","20":"tag-san-marcos","21":"tag-sandiego","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115627835668783271","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n