Chubbles No.5
I first heard mention of Chubbles at the Mikkeller Beer Celebration Copenhagen 2019. The venue was large, and for the most part people had spread out fairly evenly among the sprawl of brewer tables, with a small crowd hanging and sampling at each. A handful of breweries, though, had sizeable line-ups. They snaked their way across the communal seating area of the venue, zig-zagging their way around merch stands and load-bearing columns. Other Half, Omnipollo, Cloudwater, The Veil, and Taedonggang Brewing Company (of North Korea) all attracted these sorts of queues, and so I made it my mission to find out what all the fuss was about.
I'd been travelling solo, so the long queues were a good chance to interact with others without having to tail them around the venue like a lost puppy. In line at The Veil, a kindly local Dane started waxing poetic about this semi-regular collaboration brew that had started a few years before between Cloudwater and The Veil that they called Chubbles. We got to the front of the queue several minutes later and had a non-Chubbles beer, and the Chubbles story slipped out the back door of my mind along with most of the rest of the day's festivities.
And there Chubbles stayed - out of sight, out of fridge. It wouldn't go forgotten too long though, thanks to Cloudwater's social media team. February is apparently #ChubblesMonth now, and in celebration of Chubbles' fifth birthday we got five juicy releases. I've read very good things about the original Chubbles recipe from this year (No.4 of the releases) but that flew off the digital shelves pretty quickly. In retrospect it would've been nice to compare at least a couple of these, but today I've only got the fifth iteration at hand.
Cloudwater X The Veil | Chubbles3 Enhanced
Triple IPA | Alc 10% | Canned on 3.3.2021
Colour
Fruit smoothie-esque. Opaque pale straw.
Nose
Ripe peach, red berries, pineapple and woodsy pine. Week old orange juice as it starts to warm.
Mouth
Creamy. Quite alcoholic. Juicy at first, but completely unlike the nose. It's more orange but less ripe and throws in a tiny bit of candy sweetness to compensate for it. Medium to high bitterness and dry in the finish.
8/10
This is well layered. Four seasons of vibrant fruit in the nose, but the mouth delivers a different set of tastes entirely. I'll just draw a few comparisons with Brew by Numbers' most recent TIPA because I've had one too many of those one too many times recently. This Chubbles relies less on being juicy - especially in the finish and instead delivers a more bitter hop punch. They are two TIPAs for two different crowds, but I think old Chubbles is the better beer. Plus it comes with a legacy, so today it's the definite winner.
jay