Flowers, Tiny Dots, and Existence As A Radical Act

I cannot tell you how excited I am to share this—this is the big news I touched on in last week's rebrand announcement. We're announcing our very own core range: a witbier, a pilsner, and a pale!

For the very first time, we're launching our own beers under our own banner, which will be readily available—gone are the days of sporadic output and patchy availability!

Flowers, our 4% witbier, offers up everything I love about the style: notes of ripe orange and foam banana, bright citrus and spice from the coriander seed, and a touch of noble hop spice from the Saaz and Tettnang, it's fruity, refreshing, and complex enough to offer something different.

Our 4.5% pilsner, Tiny Dots, is crisp and refreshing, layering gentle herb and spice notes over a lovely bready pilsner malt base. Though I love big, punchy bitterness in pilsners, this is soft and mellow—accommodating enough for newcomers and delicious enough for old hats, in equal measure.

Existence As A Radical Act, our 5.5% pale, is the biggest and punchiest of the three. Fermented with kveik yeast and hopped with Citra and Simcoe, it's a huge serving of the mango, pineapple, and passionfruit expected from those hops, but also ripe tangerine, and zesty lime. This was brewed with beers like DEYA's Steady Rolling Man in mind: packed full of flavour yet always soft and never cloying. To my mind, Existence stands up to those aims.

This is perhaps the biggest outcome from our time with Cloudwater: the creation and then production of a readily-available range of beers. The two collaborations that we brewed with Cloudwater in October and November served as pilot batches for two of these beers: Statement of Intent has become Flowers, and Rainbows Aren't For Everyone is now the similarly wordy Existence As A Radical Act.

I always say that Queer Brewing has a brewing ethos with two strands: on the one hand, I want to brew beers that are so approachable and easy to get on with that anyone, even those who proclaim not to like beer, can get involved. On the other, I want to brew big, crazy, fun beers that will entice even the most seasoned beer nerd. Two good examples are beers like Queer Royale, the blackcurrant pale ale with which we launched the project in April 2019, and Flavortown, the big honeycomb imperial porter we brewed with Salt Beer Factory in October of the same year.

With this core range, we hope to take care of the former approach: these beers are all super approachable, accessible, and, across this small but well-defined range, offer a broad spectrum of flavour. As such, many of our forthcoming collaborations are going to be big, bold, bonkers beers. It's going to be fun.

These three beers will all be available to purchase from Friday: they're with distributors now and retailers up and down the country will be receiving them this week for release on Friday morning. They'll also be available to buy online via Cloudwater's online shop.

I hope you all like these beers: this is one of the most exciting moments in Queer Brewing's short history. With the help of our friends at Cloudwater, I think we've made something pretty special. I hope you think so too.

Lily Waite — Queer Brewing founder.