Beer of the Week: Green Buds

When I worked for Stone Brewing, it was during the most prolific span in the company’s history. New beers abounded, be they core creations, seasonal offerings, limited-edition specialties in various series (including the linguistically challenging Stochasticity Project) or ales and lagers coming out of Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens – Liberty Station. I recently looked back on a 2013 entry I wrote for the Stone Blog, detailing the 74 different beers the company released that year. I remember typing out that list took nearly half an hour (granted, I had to key in paragraph-sized names like – yes, this is real – Quingenti Millilitre Series | Batch 01: Green Flash/Pizza Port Carlsbad/Stone Highway 78 Scotch Ale aged in Scotch Whisky Barrels: “Chuck/Jeff/Mitch” Blend). A dozen years later, much has changed, not just at Stone but with the entire beer industry. The pendulum has swung from a nation of craft-beer drinkers that largely thirst for new beers spanning the style spectrum to consumers favoring a finite handful of styles headed by the mighty IPA. As such, there’s less motivation for a brewing company, especially a national brand like Stone, to go crazy with special releases and one-offs. Still, I long for those olden days, which is why I am happy about the release of this week’s featured beer, Stone Green Buds IPA. Not only is it a new beer; it’s the first of three new seasonals that were conceived with each other in mind. Now that’s more like it! Packaged in 16-ounce cans adorned with trippy, fluorescent-colored art that, along with its name, would seem to hint at a certain dankness, the beer delivers peachy aromas backed up by flavors of orange pith, guava and, oh yeah…there’s that dankness! Lower on bitterness than one might expect from Stone, Green Buds is still plenty bold on the palate, and thanks to scaled-back IBUs (international bittering units) it’s also extremely quaffable. (And way to go keeping the name short, Team Stone!)

Stone Green Buds IPA is one of our three new seasonal rotation beers. We wanted it to contrast with the release of Stone Chill Villain IPA, which is the third in the series, coming out at the end of 2026. While Chill Villain will be a dry-style IPA with classic pine and resin notes, Green Buds has a much fuller palate, with emphasis on sweet aromatics from Citra and Anchovy hops, and a little dankness, plus lots of dextrin malt to up the body just a little more. With Green Buds we’re taking advantage of both a new hop variety that is distinctly different from others, and some awesome high-quality hops we’ve seen coming from our suppliers. Anchovy is a variety we’ve loved for a while and is a proprietary hop from Segal Ranch. We did Stone School Mates Double IPA with it a while back and have wanted to do more with it. It has really unique melon and candy characteristics, which are perfectly complemented by the stone fruit, dankness, and sweet citrus from the Citra Hops. It only made sense to us to add lots of dextrin malt to the brew to make a more full-bodied West Coast IPA. The label artwork is inspired by psychedelic and folk music posters, and includes citrus slices to further emphasize the citrus flavors of the beer.”

Steve Gonzalez, Senior Manager of Brewing & Innovation, Stone Brewing

Stone Brewing’s World Bistro & Gardens restaurants as located at 1999 Citracado Parkway in Escondido and 2816 Historic Decatur Road in Point Loma’s Liberty Station development, and its Tap Room venues are located at 310 North Tremont Street in Oceanside and 1202 Kettner Boulevard in downtown San Diego