Cirrus/5%/ Hazy Pale Ale

We brewed Cirrus because it’s the beer we all want to drink. Big flavour, great body, and a sessionable ABV. It looks beautiful and it tastes beautiful. Ever since starting Triple Point we’ve looked to the best in the industry for our inspiration. Our intent hasn’t been to copy, but to raise our sights and then aim to do something at a similar standard, but in our own way.

The Solo and Dyad series were inspired by The Kernel in London, who have been brewing beautiful pale ales with a focus on hops for around 12 years now. We took the idea brewing a fixed base beer and altering just the single hop, or two hop combinations. The plan was to showcase the taste of an individual hop, or to explore how two different hops interacted with one another.

Cirrus - A white, whispy, high altitude, cloud of tiny ice crystals.

We were “blown away” by Northern Monk and Magic Rock’s Taprooms and whilst we haven’t got to their level yet, it’s where we want to be. And we will get there eventually.

When we went into lockdown, we bought a lot of beer from a lot of breweries, locally from the likes of Abbeydale and SMOD and nationwide from; Deya, Verdant, Brew by Numbers, Whiplash, North and more. We wanted to see how our beers compared and what we could learn. And to be totally honest, we felt that with the hop-forward beers we were okay, but not in the upper echelons of the beers we were trying.

This was frustrating, “why aren’t we at the top?” was the ever-haunting question. We’ve got an incredible brewer, an incredible brewery, Sheffield water which is the perfect canvas on which to brew a beer, what is it that’s holding us back?

I think the reason was, as we became busier and busier as a brewery, we just didn’t take the time to step out of our box and look at what everyone else was doing and honestly compare ourselves with the best. We were just comparing ourselves against yesterday (we tended to do quite well in that comparison). The one good thing that came out of lockdown for us was that it gave us the opportunity to look at what the best were brewing and then experiment.

My personal pick of the bunch was always DEYA, we ended up going through every Something Good or Saturated in… that we could get our hands on. While those were the hype beers and were fantastic, the real win of getting a DEYA order in was the 4 pack of Steady Rolling Man that was inevitably ordered alongside the other beers.

The fact that we looked forward to the 5.2% Pale ale when it arrived next to all these new hop monsters, always seemed crazy. In the world of craft beer, so much of the industry is about what’s new this week, I mean, even DEYA’s social media channels were all about ‘what’s new this week,’ even so, we’d always get a few STR’s in.

We had to try to brew something in that space!

So... Cirrus...

Our Aim - Make a juicy, pillowy, soft beer with a big, beautiful, bouncing hop load. It had to be super drinkable, and super tasty. So people (i.e. we) wanted to drink loads of it. Let’s start with the malt, extra pale marris otter (to make it look pretty and give it a strong base flavour), lots of wheat and the most oats we’ve ever used in a brew, to get that soft, pillowy, medium bodied mouthfeel. As always, we’ve used Sheffield water, and added Calcium Chloride for softness. Combined with our house ale yeast which provides a gently fruity, floral flavour and nose.

Now onto the main attraction, the HOPS. After some experimentation we’ve ended up with 5 different hops in the brew, and 5 separate additions. A combination of T90 and Cryo hops. The aim with this is that no one hop stands out, and instead we have a selection of hops that create a tropical, citrussy party on your tongue. It’s also Gluten-Free Certified and Vegan, so everyone can enjoy.

We called it Cirrus because we wanted the beer to feel like a floaty, hoppy cloud in your mouth. Despite sounding slightly lame as a name justification, we actually quite like it, so we stuck with it.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Cheers!