Batch 2482 Is Named for a Number Nobody Was Saving

Confluence marked its 1,000th batch in 2018 with its first hazy double IPA. Roughly 1,482 batches later, the brewery is doing it again under a number nobody would think to celebrate, with Galaxy, El Dorado and Lemondrop in the tank.

• Style: Hazy Double IPA
• Release Date: 2026-09-25
• ABV: 9.2%
• Confluence Brewing Company (Des Moines, IA)

The name is the number, and the number is the argument. Confluence Brewing Company releases Batch 2482 on Friday, September 25, a 9.2% hazy double IPA whose title is simply its place in the brewery's running count of everything it has ever made.

That count has history behind it. Near the end of 2018, Confluence hit batch 1,000 and marked it with its first hazy double IPA. By the brewery's own account, the experiment went well enough that it drew a conclusion from it: a milestone was never a prerequisite for messing about with hops, malt and yeast. Batch 2482 is the follow-through. Confluence runs a Beer-A-Week program, releasing a new beer every week alongside its regular lineup, which is how a batch counter climbs roughly 1,482 places in under a decade and how a number like this one comes around without ceremony.

The yeast comes first

Most hazy IPA coverage starts with the hop bill, and this one has a good one - Galaxy, El Dorado and Lemondrop, a combination that leans hard toward passionfruit, stone fruit and citrus peel. But Confluence leads its own description with the yeast, specifying a strain chosen to maximize a fruit-forward profile.

That ordering is more meaningful than it might look. In a hazy IPA, a substantial share of the tropical character does not come from hops at all. It comes from esters the yeast produces during fermentation, which land in the same passionfruit-and-stone-fruit register that modern hops do. Pick the right strain and the two effects stack. Pick a neutral one and the hops are working alone. Naming the yeast before the hops is a fair signal of where the brewery thinks the flavor is actually being built.

The brewery describes the result as a hazy, blond double IPA with intense sweet fruit, and aromas of passionfruit, pineapple, peach and citrus candy over a sticky malty body with a soft mouthfeel. Those are Confluence's notes rather than a verdict. The "sticky" and "soft" language is consistent with what a 9.2% hazy is built to do, where residual body is the point rather than a compromise.

Confluence also frames the beer as a team effort now rather than a founder's project, noting that what started with one homebrewer's experimentation has become something the whole staff contributes to.

Batch 2482 pours in the Des Moines taproom on Friday with four-packs available to go. Distribution across Iowa follows on Monday.