Return of the V-series! — Cloudwater Brew Co

We are thrilled to announce that we are going back to our roots, and setting out once again with the intention of exploring the length and breadth of the world of modern hoppy beer innovations by relaunching our legendary DIPA v-series.

Originally conceived as a series of developing our benchmark for DIPA, back when hazy, and highly hopped beers of all strengths beers were new to the UK, this time we’re excited to explore the newest production techniques, the very latest hop varietals, products and developments, and innovations from the field of brewing yeast from a position of expertise and experience.We’re excited to challenge every one of our norms, and edge towards the limits of our comfort zone, all while presenting this series of collaborations with a depth of explanation and periodic analysis.

Our intention is to work hand-in-hand in collaboration with breweries that broke ground and helped create the scene we love today, integrating breweries whose work now also focuses on progressive modern hoppy beer along the way.

Since our original v-series releases in 2016-17 we have used every opportunity to visit origin in the US and NZ. We’ve spent a great many weeks hand-selecting from hundreds of varietals, discussing agronomic concerns, meeting R&D scientists trialling new hybrids, and spending time with the very farmers who grow, thresh, kiln, and process hops into the various hop products we use today.

We’ve progressed from a naive spot-market buyer looking for intensity and impact, to a curious custodian with contracted positions, devoted to deepening our understanding of our place in the supply chain, and the ways in which our work affects thousands of lives upstream. We’re increasingly concerned with our responsibility to ask for what’s possible (given the long-term investment it takes to develop new varietals, and the impacts of climate change), whilst getting best out of what’s in front of us, and shaping the future of hops by delivering considered feedback directly to stakeholders in the hop industry.

Amongst the most frequent requests we’ve made, alongside a small cohort of breweries that have also worked to be at origin, are calls for clarity of flavour, direct fruit expression, and for varietal development that plug gaps left by the rest of the field.

We’re delighted to showcase a unique expression of a hop that’s new to us, Nectaron, and a hop we’re familiar with in T90 form (the most popular pellet standard in the industry), Motueka. Both hops in v14 came to us in the form of newly available Cryo – a process of pelletizing that uses extreme cold to freeze and strip away the majority of the leaf matter, leaving behind the oily, resinous, and densely flavoured centre of the hop flowers, concentrating the aroma intensity in each pellet, and leaving out the various qualities we have often felt detract from modern hoppy beer (such as grassy, green-tea-like, vegetal leafy notes).

We’re thrilled to restart this series with hop products new to the UK. We look forward to taking you all along on this journey of exploration and education with us. Thanks for your enthusiastic reception so far! Those singed up to our mailing list will get priority access on Tuesday 15th August, and general sale will be on Wednesday 16th August. If you want to ensure that you don't miss out, subscribe to The Good Stuff as we will be including it in the upcoming box for August.