Red ales have gone the way of the Polaroid camera: No longer omnipresent, they’re so uncool that they’re kinda cool, and when you see one it often pays to stop for a few seconds and admire it.
By and large, however, nobody drinks red ales anymore, right?
At Cloudburst in Seattle, founder and head brewer Steve Luke sees enough demand for it—or maybe he just brews it for himself—that he brews one batch per year of what he calls a West Coast double red.
The 2023 batch, named Say Hi to Your Dad for Me, won bronze at the Great American Beer Festival that year. Then the latest version, Peaked in High School, won gold at the 2025 World Beer Cup.
Luke says there are a handful of key components that make this beer fire on all cylinders. Hoppy imperial reds tend to feature some heavy malt flavor and burst with American hops. That all rings true with Peaked in High School, but Luke says the biggest improvement he has seen in his red ales over the years has to do with the yeast.
Ale, Lager, Whatever
“Say Hi was the first time we stopped using our house ale yeast,” Luke says. “Using 34/70 was the best thing we’ve done for making reds, and I’ve been making reds for 15 years at this point.”
When a beer has four types of crystal malt that comprise about 20 percent of the malt bill, you don’t usually think “dry and drinkable.” But Luke says lager yeast helped him achieve those attributes while still maintaining the style’s aggressive malt and hop character. The beer doesn’t only finish drier; it also clears up more reliably than it would with the ale yeast.
“It really helps with longevity over time, too,” Luke says. “Anyone brewing a beer like this, it’s not going to sell as fast as your IPA or pils. It’s going to hang around a bit longer.” That lager yeast’s subtle hit of sulfur is key—and while you might not notice it in the taste, it’s helping to preserve the beer. “The yeast is what really elevated our reds.”
Luke says he also believes strongly in layering different crystal malts into his reds. His four crystal malts all come from Simpsons. “We’re not shy with it,” he says. “Simpsons’ crystal malts are fire. They taste fresh, they’re uniform, and they’re consistent. I just think they’re the highest quality, and I don’t deviate from them.”
He also adds a small amount of Weyermann Carafa III to the mash. With some beers, such as a schwarzbier or black IPA, he might add those roast malts only at vorlauf—a popular method that captures the color but minimizes astringency. However, Luke says that he also sees some variability in that approach and that this is a beer of medium to medium-high malt intensity—no need to be shy. “It’s a double red, an imperial red,” he says. “You’ve got to taste that malt. It’s not like a black IPA.”
Despite that malt depth, he adds a small amount of table sugar with 20 to 30 minutes left in the boil, for a slightly leaner profile and signature West Coast drinkability. “This one finished at 2.7 [°P], and the one before 2.3,” he says. “We like keeping it dry.”
For water adjustment, Luke adds equal parts gypsum and calcium chloride—but the gypsum goes into the mash, while the calcium chloride goes into the kettle with the first-wort hops. “I really want the mouthfeel component from the calcium chloride,” he says, “and I feel it has a bigger impact in the kettle.”
There’s also something else that goes into the kettle, and this is less intuitive: a rain chain—of the sort that might hang from a gutter or garden shed—made of copper. The copper reacts with sulfates in the wort, reducing the likelihood of yeast-driven sulfur notes in the finished beer.
“We started doing that with 34/70 bricks, for that natural absorption of copper sulfate, to keep the sulfur in check,” Luke says. “We kind of don’t want people to know we’re using a lager yeast.”
Hopping a Big, Punchy Red
At knockout, Luke performs a modified hop-dip step: He takes a one-gallon (four-liter) pitcher of hot wort from the whirlpool, mixes it up with two pounds (1 kilogram) of Mosaic Incognito, and sets it aside.
After chilling the wort and pitching the yeast, he adds the hopped wort to the fementor through the dry-hop port, pushing some CO2 through the carb stone to diffuse the hot wort—still about 150°F (66°C)—and prevent it from killing the freshly pitched yeast.
Why the complicated process? “It’s to get all the good stuff in there,” Luke says. “When we added it to the whirlpool, we said, ‘Why is all this stuff getting stuck to the sides when we’re done?’ We’d rather have it scrubbed via fermentation and integrated into the beer that way.”
He says Cloudburst does this with all its West Coast IPAs; the reds are no different.
Luke enjoys the sharp, assertive nature of Mosaic, and hops from two different lots of it went into Peaked in High School. He says he was recently talking about the hop with Matt Gallagher, cofounder of Half Acre and Suncatcher in Chicago, “and how he just loved Mosaic so much in red ales,” Luke says. “If you have that magical lot of Mosaic that had some of those blueberry notes—like, the elusive blueberry Mosaic—it pairs so nicely with the fruitiness of crystal malts.”
Chinook hops are also arguably part of the Cloudburst thumbprint. “We use it in almost everything,” Luke says. He currently has five different lots of Chinook, and he picks specific lots for individual beers. “Different Chinooks for different things.”
Specifically, he considers the fruit and pine notes of each lot. For Peaked in High School, some of the Chinook came from Roy Farms in Moxee, Washington. “The Roy is equally fruity and piney,” Luke says. “For this beer, we like that pine and resin with the darker malts—the bigger character profiles of the hops can hang with that high malt flavor. We want our sharpest, brightest, piniest lots in a dark base like this.”
Hops such as Citra and El Dorado are too soft for this beer, Luke says; their flavors fade and can seem flabby. Instead, he turns to Simcoe—where he’s always looking for a ruby-red-grapefruit highlight—and late-pick Centennial, which he associates with darker fruits. “We’re not trying to get floral Centennial,” he says. “We’re trying to get the darkest, fruitiest Centennial that we can find.”
He also likes to carb a beer like this up to nearly 3 volumes of CO2. “The foam is great, the aroma is spritzy, and the hops are kind of jumping out of the glass,” he says.
The overarching goal of all these details, he says, is a punchy experience. “The amplified malt and hop characters are equally important,” Luke says. “They’re both turned up to 10.”
Even after the gold medal, he might continue tweaking the recipe. For example, there are always specific hops to get excited about trying in a beer like this. “I’ve thought about adding Idaho 7 in the dry hop,” he says. Also, “2.7°P is fine—that’s super-dry for a red—but I might go drier.”
The B-Word
While each iteration might be slightly different, there are some key components in any big, hoppy red ale from Cloudburst. You can expect a dry beer with a relatively low terminal gravity, and you can expect bright hop character that features resin, pine, and tropical notes.
“The tricky thing is the overused B-word: balance,” Luke says. “When you’re working with so much malt character, and then you’re trying to elevate the hop character to be along those lines, it’s a slippery slope.”
To that end, Luke says he sometimes feels like he’s fighting a battle between his own preference for heavy bitterness and tastes of the public, including beer judges. The battle plays out across all of Cloudburst’s hop-forward beers, but Luke says he thinks that heavy bitterness is more at home in a higher-strength red. “I think with this style, with these guidelines, bitterness can be high,” he says. “We’re kind of toeing that line. I err on the more bright, assertive bitter side with a beer like this.”
Another common thread across these beers is lager yeast, which Luke says has been a boon for flavor stability. “We’re always holding cans back, and anytime we use 34/70 for something like this, those cans taste so much better with age than our house ale yeast.”
Don’t expect to see Peaked in High School again—Luke says he’ll change the name if he tweaks the recipe. He never rebrewed Say Hi to Your Dad, which turned into Peaked in High School. What you can probably expect is another reference to a style that some might view as over the hill.
“We’re always making fun of our reds,” Luke says. “Nothing screams past-its-prime, old craft-beer drinker to me [like] a red. Like a dad-beer kind of thing.”
