Sequoia IPA Won a Homebrew Contest, Then Got Scaled Up for Real

A homebrew recipe that won the Mendocino County Homebrew Festival and then got brewed for real, in Anderson Valley's own brewhouse, with the homebrewer on hand for the day. It is pouring in Boonville while it lasts.

Style: West Coast IPA
Release Date: 2026-10-01
ABV: 7.5%
Anderson Valley Brewing Company (Boonville, CA)

The prize for winning the Mendocino County Homebrew Festival is not a ribbon. It is a brew day.

Anderson Valley Brewing Company has released Sequoia IPA, a West Coast IPA at 7.5 percent ABV that started as the winning entry from Matt Brown and Jeff Negy at the 2025 edition of the festival. The brewery sponsors the competition each year, and the winner's reward is the chance to make their beer on professional equipment. On August 26, Brown came out to Boonville to do exactly that, working with the Anderson Valley team to scale the recipe from a homebrew batch up to a commercial one.

The name honors the coast redwoods, according to the brewery. The beer itself is described simply as bursting with hop flavor, which is about as much as a West Coast IPA needs to promise. For context on where it sits in the brewery's own range, Anderson Valley's long-running flagship Hop Ottin' IPA lands at 7 percent, so the homebrew champion arrives a half point stronger than the house standard it is sharing taps with.

That competition is still running, and it is tied to something with real local weight. Every ticket to the Mendocino County Homebrew Festival supports the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, a wildfire-prevention group working in a stretch of Northern California that has reason to care. This year's festival is Saturday, November 14 at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center. Homebrewers enter free, and ticket prices rise after October 15.

Sequoia IPA debuted October 1 at Cultivo in Ukiah and is now pouring at the brewery's Boonville taproom, 17700 Boonville Road, open daily. It is a one-off batch rather than a lineup addition, so it will be around while it lasts and then it will not.

Editor’s Take

Scaling a homebrew recipe to a commercial batch is where most garage-brewing dreams quietly fall apart. Five gallons forgives almost everything. A production system forgives nothing, and the hop charges that made the kitchen version sing have to be recalculated against utilization rates, kettle geometry and a whirlpool that behaves nothing like a bucket. That Matt Brown got to stand in the Boonville brewhouse on August 26 and work that math out alongside people who do it for a living is the actual prize here, more than the tap handle at the end of it.

The name is doing something quietly nice, too. Coast redwoods are the tallest living things on earth, which is a reasonable thing to reach for when your beer is going from a homebrew batch to a 7.5 percent commercial release. And the festival that started all of this sends its ticket money to the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, which in that part of California is not a token gesture. A beer named after redwoods, funding work that keeps fire out of them. Nobody had to connect those two things on purpose for it to land.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.