The Cloudy Beer That Won Over a Clear-Beer Guy
I’ll be straight with you: for most of my life in this business, I didn’t trust a cloudy beer.
A haze in the glass meant something had gone wrong—a problem in the tank, a beer past its prime. Brewers wore clarity like a badge of honor: clean, bright, you-can-read-a-newspaper-through-it beer. We taste things with our eyes first, and my eyes did not trust the cloudy stuff. So, when the rest of the beer world started chasing it, I was the guy in the corner squinting at my glass thinking, is this thing infected?
Turns out I wasn’t alone. Also turns out I was wrong.
The haze craze, for those of us who missed the memo
Our production manager Greg tells the history better than I do, so I’ll borrow his version.
“For decades, clear was king — a haze in your beer usually meant a problem in the tank. Then somewhere in the mid-2010s, a brewery out East called Alchemist flipped the whole thing on its head with a beer called Heady Topper. They mass-produced a deliberately hazy IPA and put a now-famous instruction right on the can: drink from the can. Why? Because they knew the second people poured that cloudy beer into a glass, half of them would think it was spoiled.”
That little instruction tells you how big the shift was. An entire category of beer had to teach drinkers that the thing they’d been trained to distrust was actually the best part.
Here’s the science—no brewing degree required. That haze isn’t a flaw. It’s hop and grain compounds (proteins and polyphenols, if you want the techy words) staying suspended in the beer instead of dropping out—and those compounds carry aroma and flavor. The haze is the point. Done right, it’s the difference between a beer that smells like a pine forest crashing into a fruit stand and one that’s just…bitter.
The catch is those two words: done right.
We were on the haze train before we knew it
When I asked Greg how long Eddyline has been making hazy beer, his answer was perfect: “A long time—sometimes not intentionally.”
That’s the truth. We’d been flirting with haze for years before the science caught up to what we were tasting. Around 2019 we stopped flirting and got serious, building a series of beers off our flagship, CrankYanker IPA—variations that took what people already loved about our original West Coast IPA and pushed it somewhere new.
The very first beer we brewed in that series was Juicy.
Fun Fact: Juicy started as an experiment. It did not stay one. It earned its way out of the rotating lineup and onto the permanent calendar by 2021, where it’s been a year-round core beer ever since. We didn’t add it to the year-round line-up because it was trendy—we made it permanent because you wouldn’t let us take it away. That’s the opposite of chasing a trend. That’s beer putting down roots.
What actually goes into a glass of Juicy
Greg and the team built Juicy around the thing that makes CrankYanker great: that clean finish and the big hop punch from El Dorado hops. So they started there—and turned it up. We’re talking nearly three pounds of El Dorado per barrel, plus a whole entourage of hops led by Mosaic. That’s your Juicy signature: pineapple and tropical fruit up front, a clean pine note underneath, and not a hint of the harsh, green bitterness that gives poorly crafted IPAs a bad name.
Then there’s the feel. People call Juicy “pillowy,” and that’s not a marketing word we made up—it’s the rolled oats and flaked wheat we mash in, leaving a little body behind so the beer lands soft and full instead of thin and sharp. Fluffy, even. Drinking it is a bit like the bottom of a good whitewater line—all that churn up top, then a smooth, juicy finish. It also happens to be 7.4% ABV, so pace yourself out there.
The hardest part of a hazy, Greg will tell you:
“It isn’t making it hazy—it’s keeping it that way. Haze wants to fall out of the beer over time; gravity always wins eventually. So we lock in the details that hold it together—careful grain, cool dry-hopping, dialed-in pH, cold storage—then the one thing that matters most: freshness. The fresher that beer gets in your hand, the closer what’s in your glass is to exactly what we intended.”
It’s the whole reason a beer tastes best where it’s made.
So, did the skeptic come around?
Completely. These days I drink more hazy beer than clear, and Juicy is the beer that flipped me—seventeen years into this thing, that’s not a small admission. We built Eddyline on clean, balanced, no-nonsense beer, and Juicy proved you can make something brand new without cutting a single corner, as long as you’ve got people like Greg who refuse to.
Seventeen years in Buena Vista, and June’s hero beer is the one that taught an old skeptic a new trick. Feels about right.
So, about that kayaker on the Juicy can. That’s not just pretty art. In paddling terms, a juicy line is a drop running high and full—tons of water, well-fed, the kind of rapid you wait all spring for. The best kind of mess. Cloudy, loud, a little wild on purpose. The can art was inspired by some of Colorado’s biggest drops—Oh Be Joyful, Devil’s Punchbowls, Daisy Creek, the Crystal—and the kayakers that get stoked to go chase them. Turns out we named this beer exactly right years ago—I was just the last one to figure out why.
Grab a Juicy 16oz 6-pack, find us on tap across Colorado, or come drink it fresh at the source here in BV. Wherever your adventure takes you, we’ll see you out there.
Beers for Any Adventure!
Find Juicy IPA and the rest of the lineup at eddylinebrewery.com.
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