Cloudburst’s Essential, Quintessential Northwest IPAs

With respect to Vermont and San Diego, no region has been making hoppy American ales longer than the Pacific Northwest, where the hops are grown. For nearly forty years, IPAs have been a staple in the region, and over that time, different breweries have pushed the style forward. Were you to ask where to find the best IPAs now, those that express the quintessence of the Northwest, one might safely point to Portland’s Slabtown or Hood River or Astoria. There are a number of right answers—different strokes and all—but I’d direct you further north, to the heart of Seattle, where a shadowy, gritty warehouse houses a cramped brewery with squat fermenters crouched under low ceilings. That’s where you’ll find Cloudburst Brewing and, for my money, the most reliably tasty range of pales and IPAs in the country.

Steve Luke’s hoppy ales are at once familiar yet distinctive. They shimmer with hop particulates, but don’t look hazy, exactly. The aromas are invariably fruity, but identifiably hoppy as well—one doesn’t hang a nose over the rim of a glass and confuse them with orange juice. With most IPAs, we’re used to a balance point set to “intense,” with some combination of flavors and textures battling it out like cats in a bag. Explosiveness is their calling card, and we forgive brewers who err on the side of excess. When I drink a Cloudburst, by contrast, my immediate impression is one of balance and harmony amid intensity. Cloudburst IPAs feature saturated juicy flavors, appreciable (but far from violent) bitterness, and a spectacular quenching dryness that make them dangerously drinkable.

So many breweries make good IPAs that I forget how rare exceptional ones are. Because the style is so intense, finding that point where each element offers maximum flavor without tipping into excess is hard; composing them all so that they cohere is even harder. Steve’s approach does that, and the result are hoppy ales where each element finds its perfect sweet spot, and the three elements enhance the positive qualities of the others. A couple cans of Cloudburst recently fell into my hands, reminding me of the upper bounds of potential a good hoppy ale can reach—and how rare it is.

I thought it was high time to find out what makes Cloudburst’s hoppy ales tick, so I called Steve last week and he walked me through his process. What follows is a bit nerdy, a bit detailed, but reveals how Steve is making such interesting and distinctive IPAs.

Clean, Cool, Long Fermentation

American ale yeasts typically started somewhere in the UK, but depending on when they emigrated, have become more or less expressive and efficient. In the early days of craft brewing, clean, neutral yeasts like Sierra Nevada’s were the standard. The fascination with juicy, fruity flavors led breweries to embrace highly estery English strains, which had the benefit (?) of making IPAs cloudy and opaque as well as under-attenuated and sweet. That’s not the profile Steve was shooting for.

“This yeast, it’s very attenuative. We’re not using a London III or some other low-floc English yeast to make beers. Depending on where we’re mashing at, these yeasts are still finishing on average at 2 [Plato]. Everything is going to be dried out, even if you mash warm.”

Let’s unpack this important paragraph. Flocculation refers to the habit of yeast cells to clump together and then fall out of suspension. “Low-floc” yeasts don’t clump, so the tiny cells remain light enough to stay in suspension. Mashing temperatures will produce different qualities, and warm mashes produce sugars most yeast can’t convert to alcohol—but Steve’s can. Finally, most IPAs will finish at 3-4 Plato, and some New England hazies at 5 or higher. Getting an IPA down to 2 Plato is pushing it toward saison territory: it’s very dry.

“Our yeast is a variant of an old Siebel yeast, BRY 96. It’s an American-English hybrid. These all have a muddled past: was it Ballantine, was it Narragansett, was it a Genesee thing?—I don’t know. But they all seem to come from Upstate New York.”

Another important question is fermentation temperature. The higher the temp, the more flavor compounds yeast will produce. Many brewers ferment warm to encourage the yeast to throw off fruity esters, which accentuate the fruity flavors and aromas of modern hop varieties. Again, that’s not what Steve wants.

“I’m not a big fan of esters in general. I don’t like those hot, piercing esters some of these beers produce…. Our primary is at 67. I feel like a lot of the hazies with those English strains could get a little warmer. It sounds like those differences are miniscule—a degree or two here or there. But in my experience, a degree or two makes quite a bit of difference.”

Cloudburst conducts a very long primary fermentation of 12-14 days. That’s more like a lager fermentation; ales usually pass through primary in just a few days. I mentioned that I found Cloudburst’s beers to be very clean, with lno weird fermentation characteristics, and Steve gave an animated reply.

“Fermentation characteristics, and more specifically a clean, healthy fermentation is that final frontier that your typical craft beer consumer is aware of or picking up on. Brewers, that’s the first thing we’re smelling—how is this fermentation? Even before I’m trying to pick up the dry hops, I’m trying to assess if this fermentation was any good and do I like what it’s thrown.”

It’s not incidental that we began with fermentation (the subject Steve introduced). The flavors and aromas of IPAs are dominated by hops, but their expression exists in the context of other elements. How those hops emerge depends on other techniques. For Cloudburst, fermentation seems to be pivotal. “So yeah,” Steve summarized. “We go a little bit cooler and a little bit longer to really try to produce a healthy, clean fermentation that minimizes the esters our strain with throw.”

Integrated Hopping and a “Ridgeline” of Bitterness

As American IPAs have evolved, brewers have tried to squeeze ever more juiciness from hops by using them later and later in the process. Many breweries now add very few hops to the kettle during the boil, loading massive amounts during the whirlpool, fermenter, and conditioning tanks. This approach accentuates juiciness, but it comes at the expense of qualities Steve admires.

“As people shy away from adding hops to the kettle, you lose the initial bitterness, that ridgeline, that you create from boil additions, and you also lose depth of flavor. One of our old-world things is that we add hops to the kettle, to the boil, usually three additions. We are adding at the start of boil, something in the middle, like two-thirds through the boil, and then right before the boil ends. We do that classic three-kettle addition thing that Europeans have been doing for centuries. Even with Czech pilsners, it’s like, ‘You must add hops at boil, you must add them halfway through, you must add them at the end: that’s how you make a Czech pilsner.’ There’s something to be said about that—they know what they’re doing.”

That description might worry people who haven’t sampled Cloudburst’s beers. It calls to mind the painful IPAs of the aughts, with their weedy, excessively piney, and stinging bitterness. Cloudburst’s beers have none of that. Instead, they get a more integrated, saturated bitterness. Steve isn’t using huge amounts of hops in these additions or creating very bitter beers (given how dry they are, that’s a risk), but he’s getting a fuller, deeper profile. “We really want the beer to be better by your last sip,” he says of his rationale. “I feel like a lot of beers fall apart by the last sip.”

Cloudburst restrains the number of hop varieties in a beer to 2-4, and Steve has opinions on which produce the best results.

“I am paying attention to the alpha acid content around bitterness at our first boil addition, but I’m looking less at analytics than thinking more about what each hop variety [expresses]. So if it’s something like a Citra or an El Dorado, those hops are much softer. If I want an IPA you can ease into, we’ll add those to the kettle. If we want to double down on our pine and bitterness, then I’m thinking of Simcoe. And, if you want it to be a sharper tropical profile, we’ll lean into Mosaic. A lot of it is trial and error and paying attention to what you’re doing.”

And, to really emphasize his old-school cred, he added,

“I love Chinook. It gives a nice piney, pithy, resinous backbone that never really comes off as harsh, but it’s present. It sets the tone. It’s not a sexy hop by any means, but I think it’s a sneaky hop that a lot of brewers really enjoy.”

The Cloudburst hop profile tends to be soft but zingy. The use of kettle hops gives them a sharpness, a clarity of flavor, that comes across as zingy or pinquant but always appealingly. They are rarely overbalanced, with pungent, catty, or musky notes, but rather have a clean, appealing juiciness.

The Cræft of Hops

Steve hasn’t been brewing as long as some of the old gentlemen brewers of Europe I’ve profiled—and yet he talks about beer like they do. I’ve mentioned it before in the context of “cræft”—the way the wisdom of a craft begins to reside in the craftsperson, rather than a machine or tool. In brewing, it’s the knowledge of all the variables integrated in the mind of the brewer so that they can sense the influences of even subtle change. A year ago, when I was in Sussex, Miles Jenner began our tour of Harvey’s Brewery by discussing the course his water took through the earth once it fell in nearby hills. It wasn’t just a poetic touch; he knew that water and exactly how it affected his beer.

As I hope is evident in these extensive quotes, when I asked Steve about different elements of his process, he wove history and tradition, science, learned experience, and “feel” into his responses. He spoke of very subtle factors that might not seem important to the casual eye. And critically, he understood at an experiential level how the different ingredients and processes impact his beer. The Cloudburst range seems recognizable beer to beer and in speaking with Steve, I came to see the intention and logic that led to this profile.

Steve started brewing in his native New England at Allagash, but spent a long stretch at Elysian before starting Cloudburst. There he became steeped in the Northwest school of IPAs. If we leave aside the mid-decade intervention of New England hazies and consider Cloudburst’s hoppy ales in isolation, they represent a direct stage of evolution in that school. They are hazy and hoppy in the way Northwest IPAs have been for decades, yet updated to reflect the potential of modern varieties of hops. They are approachable, winsome, and full of life. When I taste them, the feel both updated and modern, but also familiar and recognizable. They don’t seem imitative or trendy, and yet do seem to speak of place. Cloudburst isn’t a big brewery, and their distribution is limited and no one can travel right now. As soon as you can, track down some of their beer and see if you don’t agree.