Existence As A Radical Act
Just like with our witbier, Flowers, which was a refined version of an earlier Cloudwater collaboration, some of you might be familiar with our pale ale, Existence As A Radical Act: it’s a refined version of our second collab, Rainbows Aren’t For Everyone.
This is a beer we foresee making up a large part of our output volume, and the one we anticipate becoming our flagship. After all, who doesn’t love a delicious pale ale?
The intention behind this beer was to brew something not unlike the pale ales we love, beers such as DEYA’s Steady Rolling Man (the best pale ale brewed in the UK, if you ask me), Pressure Drop’s Pale Fire, and Northern Monk’s Faith. These beers are effortlessly drinkable, bursting with hop character and juicy fruit notes, exemplifying everything we love about session-strength hoppy beer. There’s a softness to them that lends itself to ease of enjoyment—these are beers that can be pored over and dissected with a critical eye, and also enjoyed just in the drinking of them.
With the Cloudwater collaboration, Rainbows Aren’t For Everyone, we wanted to brew something that was low in bitterness, to be appealing to everyone—a more intense bitterness can often be off-putting to those coming into craft beer, which is why low-bitterness New England styles are so universally appealing and act as such great gateway beers—and full of fruit flavour. We also wanted to approach it slightly differently, given how crowded the market is with these styles.
Brewing with Kveik yeast—an idiosyncratic and wonderfully unique family of Norwegian farmhouse yeasts—isn’t exactly groundbreaking, as plenty of breweries have taken this yeast outside of its context of origin and used it in contemporary, hoppy beers. I’ve used it once before, in collaboration with New York’s Fifth Hammer Brewing Company, though I never got to taste the results, as this beer was draft-only, and by the time it was on tap, I’d left the city.
The Kveik brought a heady ripeness to this beer, layering beautiful tangerine notes over the already vibrant fruit character from the Citra and Simcoe hops. The results were tangerine, mango, passionfruit, lime, and pineapple, all wrapped up in a beautifully soft pale ale.
Existence is that same pale: the same malt bill; the same hops; the same yeast. After getting some feedback on Rainbows, however, we’ve tweaked it a little—we’ve lowered the hops added on the hot side, reducing the bitterness ever-so-slightly. We’ve also reduced the fermentation temperature a few degrees to lessen the yeast character a little.
We think you’re going to love this beer. To my mind it stands up to some of the very best pale ales of its kind, and is a beer I really love to drink. It’s an absolute winner.
Lily — Queer Brewing founder