The Hop Quality Group and Cloudburst Brewing’s place in it



There’s no sense trying to reinvent or retell the stories that Cloudburst Brewing shares on Instagram. (Picture above pinched from Instagram.) The brewery tells its own stories exceedingly well. It is a study on how to use social media, IMHO. It’s their unique voice, it’s their authentic personality.

Everything you need to know about Cloudburst Brewing is exemplified in its Instagram presence. Like the beers that Cloudburst creates, its Instagram feed is delicious, entertaining, irreverent, thoughtful, whimsical, creative as hell, and quite often funny AF. You really should be following along. If this post accomplishes nothing else, I hope you start following Cloudburst on Instagram.

There! Enough gushing. Cloudburst Brewing recently posted something on Instagram that is worthy of transferring to blog form, in case you missed it elsewhere. So here it is in a less immediate, but more everlasting format.

“Take a seat, please. It’s time to release Performance Review Pale Ale.”


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“So, yea, it might SEEM like this is just another pale that we brewed with a new experimental hop variety…but this one is EXTRA special. First, because NOBODY in the entire world has ever brewed with this hop before. How do we know this? Well, we’re part of the trade group that CREATED IT. This baby was bred, trialed, planted, harvested and processed at Oregon State University as part of the experimental line program funded by the Hop Quality Group. And this year’s harvest yielded us….34 pounds of pellets. Total. And we got it all. So there’s that. How EXCITING!”

“But let’s backtrack a little bit. You might be wondering – what the in the bejesus is the Hop Quality Group? It sounds like another random department down a white hallway at Lumon Industries, just past the baby goats…. The @hopqualitygroup was established in 2010 by a group of 9 breweries you’ve probably heard of – Russian River, Sierra Nevada, Stone, Bell’s, New Belgium, Firestone Walker, Odells, New Glarus, & Sam Adams – and has grown to be a group of 50+ breweries, including yours truly. We tour hop farms, facilities and pellet mills; establish best practice guidelines for quality and safety; foster relationships with growers and their local communities; and fund a breeding program that someday will produce new, publicly available hop varieties…maybe like this one, currently named HQ2015031-002. But before we plant more of this, we need to figure it all out. And thus, this beer!”


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“This pale is extra light in body with notes of blueberries, white peach, & lemon balm, all wrapped in a dry, citrusy finish. It’s on sale today, at both spots, for you to trial. Ok, go on now. This review is complete. You did…fine.” https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc8XQkUrgTM/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link



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2 thoughts on “The Hop Quality Group and Cloudburst Brewing’s place in it

  1. > There’s no sense trying to […] retell the stories that Cloudburst Brewing shares on Instagram.

    On the contrary, those stories are ordinarily locked away in a proprietary platform that’s at best hostile to outsiders, if not totally opaque. I’m grateful that you lifted this up to the open web.

    1. Andrew, that’s a good point on a few different levels. Those of us entrenched in various social media channels often forget that not everyone pays attention to those channels. Many breweries these days rely quite heavily on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (or a combination of those things) to share their news and info. That means people who do not follow along on those channels are out in the cold. I am thinking about this. Thinking about how to best address this on the blog.

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