Bale Breaker and Cloudburst Brewing have been making a beer together for twelve years. This year's edition arrives with a footnote: Cloudburst is now, in Bale Breaker's words, officially part of the family.

Citra Slicker Wet Hop IPA is out now at both breweries' taprooms, and Bale Breaker says it reaches regular distribution in Washington, Oregon and Idaho within the next week. It lands at 6.2 percent and 60 IBU.

The announcement frames the business news the way the two breweries apparently frame everything else. Bale Breaker notes twelve years of brewing together and more than fifteen of friendship before getting to the part where Cloudburst joined the family, and describes Cloudburst founder Steve Luke as its new step-brother. The beer, the brewery says, comes from "the big, happy, blended family" of the two operations.

The four-minute hop supply

The hops are wet Citra from Loftus Ranches, which the newsletter places four minutes from the brewhouse. That distance is the same geographic advantage behind Bale Breaker's other fresh hop releases. The Yakima brewery sits in the middle of its family's hop farm, so the short window between picking and brewing that usually governs wet hop beer is, for Bale Breaker, a drive across the property.

Bale Breaker says hundreds of pounds went into the batch. Wet hops are mostly water, so the weight is less dramatic than it sounds in dried-pellet terms, but it still represents a quantity that only makes sense when the field and the kettle are on the same road.

Citra is a sensible hop to treat this way. In its dried form it is the reliable source of grapefruit, lime and passionfruit that anchored a generation of American IPA. Fresh, it tends to keep the tropical side while picking up something greener and more vegetal around the edges. The brewery describes the results as crisp and aromatic, with tropical fruit and fresh hop character.

Distribution reaches bottle shops and stores across the three states in the coming week. Both taprooms have it pouring now.

Editor’s Take

Twelve years of brewing a beer together is a long time for anything in craft beer, an industry where a collaboration is usually two breweries meeting at a festival and agreeing to put both logos on a can before anyone sobers up. Bale Breaker and Cloudburst have been doing this annually since roughly the point where most collab partners would have drifted into polite Instagram tagging. The friendship predates it by another three years.

So the joke lands because it is load-bearing. Calling Steve Luke a step-brother is the sort of thing you can only say about someone you have actually spent fifteen years around, and it is a much better way of announcing a corporate development than the press-release vocabulary normally reserved for these things. Nobody writes 'synergies' when they can write 'step-brother.'

The beer itself is almost stubbornly on-message about it. Wet Citra, hundreds of pounds, from a field four minutes away, into a recipe the two breweries have been refining for over a decade. Everything about this release is the same relationship at a different scale, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a beer with a pun for a name.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Citra Slicker Marks 12 Years of Brewing With Cloudburst, Now Family

Twelve years of brewing together, fifteen of friendship, and now Cloudburst is formally part of the Bale Breaker family. The beer marking it runs on hundreds of pounds of wet Citra picked four minutes from the brewhouse.

The four-minute hop supply

Source & Editorial