Tree House (2025)

I think it means its the Juice Machine base recipe with the NZ (Nelson, Paradisi, Peach, Rakau) hops and none of the American / Galaxy hops.

 

Yeah I guess thinking further it’s the malt bill and boils schedule maybe? Still will be vastly different.

 

@Jbrews is right: You gotta let these hoppy beers sit for a few weeks. At least. Also decanting.

I have a Doubleganger from 3/17 and it's sooo fucking good. Even Nate mentioned beer reaching its "peak" after like, 3 months.

I got shredded in this thread a couple years ago for suggesting this when someone said the IPA's fall off after like 3 days. I guess some people love when hops go down like stomach acid.

 

I had this exact thought. As soon as the hob bill changes, it ceases to be whatever beer it was. For example: Alter Ego is Julius with some Mosaic in the dry hop...

 

I get what you guys are saying, but aren't entire lines of some beers the exact same thing except just with different hops? First IPAs I drank a lot of where Trillium Street series beers, and they're all the same but with a different hop bill, essentially. I don't see Cloud Machine as any different, esp when they explicitly tell you the hops in the beer. Did people expect Queen Machine to be the same as Juice Machine? I don't imagine so, but maybe I'm wrong.

 

I feel out of touch as I have not clicked on "the spreadsheet" in a while but don't see anything posted since February? Just making sure I have the right doc. I am sad to see this go if that is the case but thankful to whoever kept that up for as long as they did as I always loved placing my orders knowing exactly when every beer I was ordering was canned.

 

Their Twitter still always posts every release, unlike instagram, but yes the excel sheet is sadly dead.

 

Slightly less convenient now that fb doesn’t just go 100% descending timeline order, but if you go to the tree house line updates fb group, the comments every day show what they added. Like 5 more min of work than the spreadsheet was but just about as helpful overall.

 

I agree, but that's why they're calling it Cloud Machine and not Juice Machine.

 

It's odd in that in some cases, they change the name of the beer completely, and in others, they call it a variant.

In the case of Alter Ego it works well because to my taste, Alter is a very different beer than Julius (and one that I much prefer when at its best). Alter Ego has a blueberry/pine combo that wows me when it's on. Julius is of course delightful too, but the addition of Mosaic and Amarillo makes Alter into a very different tasting product compared to the mango/orange profile of Julius.

But then there's something like Bright or Eureka, which are called Bright Mosaic / Eureka Citra / etc, keeping the base name the same and just changing the hop.

 

Agreed. But they market it as a rendition of Juice Machine. It's Juice Machine but with almost everything about it being different. Just seems like a phony thing to say to sell it

 

I did not expect to start this much commentary. But I like it.

 

Most of their fan base are just looking at the Untappd rating and buying based off of that.

Doesn’t mean the descriptions shouldn’t be accurate, but also doesn’t matter all that much.

 

I assume it’s just changing the hops and literally nothing else - so, no not almost everything is different. I would assume otherwise it’s the exact same malt bill, same yeast and same water profile as JM.

This is pretty common for how IPA centric breweries name hop changes on the same base recipe. And Tree House has a lot of other hoppy beers that use different yeasts and grain bills (and they sure will make sure they market it as such). Not my favorite thing about craft beer but at least they’re also very clear about it.

 

But the description on the can IS accurate. This wasn't one of the flowery, wtf is in here descriptions. They named the specific hops in the beer and where they come from, and gave tasting notes.

 

Got it, thanks for the clarification. I was just going off of what’s in this thread.

 

While I largely agree with the overall point, I do like to be fair. Lager-centric breweries don’t have nearly the same amount of beers as a Tree House or Other Half, yet their pale lagers follow a similar theme.

For example Notch recently did riffs on The Standard which had slightly different ingredients but otherwise the same process. This produces a subtle change in the flavor profile.

There’s just so many different hop combinations, that you can have virtually endless varieties of IPAs. Craft beer tends to “jump the shark” so to speak by doing too much of this.

You see it with stouts too where there’s endless combinations of adjuncts thrown in and/or barrels to age in.

Personally I like smaller well curated lists of say 10-12 beers across multiple styles. I think Tree House could do just as well with a beer list that’s a quarter of what they offer, but who I am to argue with arguably, to date, the most successful business model in craft beer. I think where many breweries go wrong is that their beers aren’t nearly as good as a Tree House, yet they still have a bloated tap list of mediocre beers.

 

Anyone know if there’s outdoor seating for the pru beer garden now?

 

Yes they do!