Clouds, our New England Style double IPA, represents the culmination of years of hard work and determination to decode one of the newest and most popular styles of beer in America. That’s why it was incredibly rewarding to hear our name called during the 2021 Great American Beer Festival® (GABF) awards when we received the silver medal in the category for “Juicy or Hazy Imperial IPA” (aka New England Style Double IPA) — one of the categories that was recently created to formally recognize and celebrate the New England hazy/juicy styles of beer being produced.
This was our first time entering a beer in the GABF competition, and with 9,680 entries from over 2000 breweries, the competition was steep! After analyzing every single beer, the judges felt like one of the best examples of New England style double IPA is being made at BKS Artisan Ales in Kansas City, Missouri.
Long before we opened the doors of BKS Artisan Ales, we were meticulously — and some might say obsessively — developing what would eventually become the base recipes for our favorite styles of beer. Some were easy; the techniques were well-documented and we’d brewed them enough to know how to get the exact characteristics we wanted. New England style double IPA was a whole other beast. Very little info existed at the time, which left us to our own research and study, and we tasted through as many examples of the style as we could get our hands on. We formed our own opinions about what we thought the ideal New England style double IPA should be and began doing trial and error batches to figure out how to bring our vision of the perfect juicy, hazy double IPA to life.
Hops are obviously important, but the malt profile needs as much attention to detail. We realized that we preferred a combination of various pale malts to create enough interesting malt character to balance out the huge hop additions that come during dry-hopping. Pale malts become enhanced by oats and wheat that help contribute to the silky smooth mouthfeel and give it the haze essential to the style. The malt bill of Clouds creates a beautifully golden, hazy counterpoint to balance out some of our favorite hops.
The workhorse hop in Clouds is Citra and we have figured out over time exactly what profiles we need to see in the Citra hops we select. Citra shows up on brew day but then makes a reappearance during dry-hopping along with three additional hops: Simcoe, El Dorado and Mosaic. Simcoe leads the way, melding beautifully with the Citra, El Dorado and Mosaic. The hops all work together to give the beer the juicy notes of citrus, grapefruit zest, mango, and just the faintest note of pine sap that defines a stellar New England style double IPA.
Malt and hops alone won’t make a world-class beer. We tweaked the water profile over and over as we experimented. We tried different yeasts and kept adjusting other variables that would affect fermentation. Finally, in November of 2016 our recipe was set and we believed we had brewed something special.
The cloudy beer pretty much named itself. The soft, pillowy mouthfeel and glorious white tufts of head on the top each pour evoked clouds in a way that told us we couldn’t name the beer anything else. Clocking in at 8.2% ABV the beer definitely belongs in an “Imperial” category but each sip is incredibly smooth and bursting with hop aroma and flavor.
You may not always see Clouds on our tap list but you will always see a couple different New England style hoppy beers. It’s one of the styles that we have become most known for and we get a lot of satisfaction out of utilizing different hop and malt combinations to create different flavor profiles.
We are incredibly honored to have Clouds recognized at the GABF awards. We’ve been on this journey, first as homebrewers and then professionally, for more than a decade and feel grateful for the wonderful crew at the brewery that helps make the beer and run the taproom, the fans that love our beer and support us, and the beer community in the midwest that we are so proud to be a part of.
View local news coverage of Clouds DIPA:
- Kansas City Business Journal, Kansas City brewer wins area’s sole 2021 Great American Beer Festival medal, September 20, 2021
- Kansas City Magazine, A Kansas City brewery took silver in one of the biggest beer competitions in the world, September 14, 2021
- Feast, These 4 Missouri breweries just took home medals at the Great American Beer Festival, September 13, 2021
- KC Ale Trail, Behind The Beer: BKS Artisan Ales Award-Winning Clouds Double IPA, September 15, 2021
