Cloudwater Essence IPA

Cloudwater pretty much helped redefine modern British craft beer. Founded in Manchester in 2014, the brewery exploded onto the international scene absurdly quickly thanks to world-class hazy IPAs, obsessive attention to quality and a refusal to treat beer as something that needed to stay trapped inside traditional British brewing expectations.

At a time when much of UK beer was still arguing about whether craft lager counted as betrayal, Cloudwater started releasing heavily hopped seasonal beers with freshness and intensity matching the best breweries anywhere in the world. Within a few years they were appearing in global brewery rankings alongside names American beer nerds had previously assumed nobody outside Vermont could compete with.

The brewery became especially famous for soft, juicy DIPAs packed with tropical fruit and haze, but the range stretches far wider now. Barrel-aged stouts, saisons, lagers, alcohol-free beers and experimental collaborations all appear regularly, usually handled with the same obsessive quality control.

What makes Cloudwater especially important is the influence they had on UK beer culture generally. Freshness, modern packaging, seasonal releases and soft New England-style IPAs all accelerated massively once Cloudwater arrived.

They also somehow made minimalist can design feel genuinely cool rather than looking like unfinished supermarket own-brand soup labels.

Most importantly though, the beers remain excellent. Bright, expressive and carefully brewed without disappearing fully into hype-driven chaos.