Prepare yourself: the transatlantic collaborations are coming. And we’ve got Cloudwater to thank for this. Its recent Friends & Family & Beer festival brought a heap of excellent brewers together, many of them from the USA, some of whom were visiting the UK for the first time. And when brewers are in town, they collaborate. The beneficiary of this beer-y bomb cyclone? That’s you!
The resulting volume of collabs flowing in the wake of the festival can be a little overwhelming, however. Dare you try and catch them all? Don’t worry, no one’s judging you if you just want to chill out and enjoy a cold one and leave the hype well alone. Well, almost no one.
When it comes to collaborations, Cloudwater and Richmond, Virginia’s The Veil have previous. They teamed up a couple of years back to produce the devastatingly tropical triple IPA, Chubbles, which sent beer fans into raptures. They followed this up last year with yet another intensely named TIPA, creatively named Paul from Cloudwater. Cans of the latter even featured a caricature of Cloudwater founder Paul Jones, replete with beaming grin and ginger beard.
Now this dynamic duo has teamed up again to produce a beer you’ll be positively Jonesing for, the equally imaginatively named Barry from Finance. I’m not sure who Barry is, but evidently he’s a fan of fruit juice, as that is what this beer can be described as in the simplest of terms. Barry features gratuitous additions of pineapple and passion fruit, alongside orange zest for a citrus kick.
Make no mistake, this hazy yellow beer is thick as. Evidently, it’s loaded with as much fruit as your breakfast smoothie, and then some. But while it does have a lush mouthfeel, buoyed by waves of tropical fruit flavour (and not much else – not that this matters), its girthiness is met by tart, citrus flavours. Where one moment it’s full and rich, the next it’s zippy and zesty.
If you like the juice levels in your juice-grenades loaded to the max, then this is a beer for you. The person judging you for missing out on it? Well, that’s me.
Matthew Curtis is a freelance writer, photographer and author of our award-winning Fundamentals column. He's written for publications including BEER, Ferment, Good Beer Hunting and Original Gravity. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @totalcurtis. Pick up a can of Barry From Finance ASAP...