Cloudwater Barrel Project - Beers you can't rush

The Cloudwater Barrel Project is a celebration of patience, craftsmanship, quality ingredients and nature. Every Barrel Project beer in this series is truly "made with time and love."

We let the beer guide our process, aging our brews in a variety of meticulously sourced barrels, picked for their individual properties, expertly blending and often combining with organic fruits, herbs and spices intended to provide balance and excitement in every sip.

Our releases span a variety of styles including spontaneously fermented beers in our own coolship and aged in 3 500l foeders or hundreds of individual barrels inspired by Belgian classics. We also love to create rich, decadent barrel-aged imperial stouts and age them on cacao, vanilla and other delicious ingredients.

While we typically share these creations during our winter releases, we don't follow a rigid calendar - we only package and release a beer when it tells us it is perfectly ready.

Barrel Project Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cloudwater Barrel Project?

The Cloudwater Barrel Project is a labour of love, where we make beers over months and years

Barrel Ageing has been at the heart of what we do at Cloudwater since the brewery’s inception in 2014. We made a modest start with a handful of wine barrels and in 2016 we took delivery of three 5000L foudres (or foeders). Now our barrels hail from all sorts of backgrounds, each bringing unique qualities. We are currently using barrels that have previously hosted bourbon, single malt, rye whisky, red port, apple brandy, apricot brandy, wine, sherry, cognac and rum.

Visitors to Cloudwater in our early days will recall sitting amongst the barrels at our old taproom in the railway arches. Now, you can see our dozens of barrels and the three large foudres in our Unit 9 taproom. You may even catch a glimpse of our barrel master at work!

How should Barrel Project beers be stored?

Brown and Green glass are favoured for their ability to inhibit or reduce skunking of hops in beer that were added (and boiled) during the brew day.

We use brown, green and clear glass bottles. Clear glass allows the beautiful visual characteristics of our stouts and fruited beers (or any other beers also made with little to no chance of skunking by way of little to no hops used during the brew day) to shine.

We don’t think clear glass will influence this beer’s potential to age gracefully, but good ageing practices should be routine for best experiences: Age bottles in a steady low temperature environment, away from strong odours, mould, sources of heat and light.

Although some of our beers will develop new characteristics over time, the connoisseur will recognise ageing as a process as more of slow flavour change (some fresh characteristics may mellow or fall away entirely in order for additional complexities or subtleties to reveal themselves).

Are any of your beers vegan or gluten free?

ALL of our beer is vegan! We never add lactose or animal-based products to any of our products.

We have a small selection of gluten free products, with Piccadilly Pilsner & SoCal being our only currently always-available beers that are gluten free. Individual products have allergen information on their pages, so please check for details. Cans & bottles will have this information printed on the label too

Barrel Project Releases

Barrel Project Frequently Asked Questions