Lagunitas Cappucino Stout

AFFORDABILITY: I was afraid of the Lagunitas beers because they were the makers of the shittingly unimpressive Brown Shugga beer that I had such high hopes for. However, I had just had my first paycheck from new job direct deposited into my banking account overnight, and was at the end of another work week, and wanted to celebrate baby steps towards success. So after returning some porn movies to Ultimate Bliss, I ran by Wine Warehouse in it's weird cubbyhole on Hydraulic to stare at their confusing and tight-fitting corner of fancy beers, in hopes of finding the bomb ass brew. Usually my attitude in a store like that is either a six-pack or two big bottle per $10 desired to spend. I was rolling with $20 blown in my mind, so I picked out a sixer I thought the wife might like, and then rolled with a pair of big bottles for myself. Most of my life, I have not been a coffee drinker, but something shifted the past four months, and I'm drinking coffee daily, to the point I can tell my breath be stanking from coffee breath. Mostly, I bypass coffee shops and buy up the shitty flavored ground coffee styles that are above cheap ass Folger's but not the non-ground bean type fancy fucker coffees. If on the road, I hit the gas stations with the food shops (often times referred to as "shoppes") because you can get the big cups of coffee with the heat protective cup wrapper and inject it with mad sugar and hazlenut creamer and get my fake hype on. So even last summer, a beer with a coffee effect would've been "Eww, gross," to me. The Cappucino Stout rocked a four-and-a-half dollar pricetag for the double deuce plus some bottle, but it also promised a thick 9% alcohol content. I am upwardly mobile, and white as fuck. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: 9.26% alcohol, even if only one big bottle, put an Asiatic spike to my bloodstream. I’m not sold on the whole beer/coffee hybrids that seem to be popping up all of a sudden, but if I lived near the stupid Lagunitas place and could acquire their alcohol in a larger batches at more affordable rates, I would drink this. This would actually be a perfect growler beer, walking the railroad tracks on a cool October Friday night. Of course, being this was good, it was a limited release beer, which means I’ll probably never see it again, but they’ll have those stupid crappy Brown Shugga beers everywhere. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Cappucino Stout label looked like someone might've done it with an HP printer a little bit nicer than mine at home, which made me sort of enjoy it by associating it with homebrews in my head, where by the time you finish drinking a bottle, your thumb has worn off the print on the cheap ass label. But this wasn't a homebrew; this was an expensive ass bottle of beer I bought at a store where I've never seen a black or Mexican person in it, nor even other white people who wear t-shirts as their outermost shirt now that I think about it. They explained some of their coffee/beer science I guess, but to be honest, now that I'm a coffee drinker on the regular, I don't want to mix my alcohols and caffeines. Coffee keeps me focused during the long boring days of my slow death, and beer uninhibits me during those fleeting moments of wage slave freedom so that I can pretend to enjoy my life momentarily. To mix the two up together seems stupid, like playing tug-of-war with myself. This is most definitely not a "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" thing. 1 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Lagunitas is a purposely wacky microbrewing company that seems to be heavily enamored with Frank Zappa. I am of the belief that Frank Zappa is overrated, although still deserving of credit for being so openly contrarian. I don't necessarily support people who are purposely wacky for commercial reasons, although I am also a stupid fucking consumer and fall victim to this type of dumb shit every day. It has been part of my social conditioning; I am Generation X, even to the point I just there labelled myself with that term even though it's a stupid fucking term that has nothing to do with me. Yet somehow the shoe fits, so I begrudgingly wear it, and Lagunitas tries their bestest to give me some alcoholic laces to tie myself up with. Smarmy assholes. 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I cannot outright diss this beer, though the coffee I’ve been drinking too much of lately has discombobulated my thinking processes to where I feel constantly off-kilter. I need to cleanse myself methinks. But I also see why there is the stereotype of the coffeehouse poet, because it’s hard to put together complete streams of consciousness with this constant haze buzzing the edges of my frontal and parietal cortexes; and what is poetry after all but an easier form of writing for people who can’t write full things? I have had mixed experiences with the various Lagunitas beers I’ve drunken over the years, more not so favorable than favorable, so I would expect this to be a single shot into my drinking diet that will never be sought out again because there’s nothing that made it seem special enough to deserve the blood flow of my heart. 1 out of 5. (I also just noticed that I've mis-spelled "cappuccino" the whole way through, but rather than go back and fix it, I'd rather just say fuck people that drink cappucinos. The only good cappucino was a gypsy cab driver from Baltimore.)
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!