Malted Musings

Cigar City Hits NYC

Every few years, the craft brewing world is hit by an “it” brewer. The late 1990s featured Dogfish Head of Rehoboth Beach, DE, while the early 2000s featured Stone Brewing of Escondido, CA, and the last few years have seen nothing but accolades for Russian River Brewing Company of Santa Rosa, CA. To this who’s who of the brewing world, we add Cigar City Brewing of Tampa, FL. Last year, this small brewer made a big impact by being named the third best brewery in the world by the Ratebeer Best competition as well as taking home Gold in the Wood and Barrel-Aged Beer category at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival. Not bad for a brewery that is a little over a year old.

Putting final touches on CCB logo

The brewery itself is fairly small, brewing on a 15 bbl system mostly for the Tampa market.  Many of their beers are named after elements of the local Tampa culture and are highly desired by craft beer fans in Florida and worldwide.  Although most of their production is consumed locally, the good folks at SKI Beer Distributers have managed to bring Cigar City to Gotham City.  Initially, the folks of Nueva York were treated to a selection of their bottled products, like Bolita Brown, Warmer Winter Winter Warmer, and Improvisación Oatmeal Rye India Brown Ale, but on a recent Wednesday, Manhattan’s Rattle N Hum Bar played host to the largest lineup of Cigar City Brewing products ever assembled in one place with twenty different CCB beers being poured.  This included two of the Ratebeer Top 50 beers, Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout and Bourbon Barrel-aged Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout, as well as the GABF Gold-medal winner Humidor Series Jai Alai IPA.

Tap Handle Selection

One of the fun parts of a brewery like Cigar City is the ability to see how subtle changes in the way a particular base beer has been treated has a profound effect on the final product.  This approach to subtly tweaking their recipes was very much on display at this event.  The first flight of beer I sampled consisted entirely of Imperial Stouts.  The base beer was Marshal Zhukov Imperial Stout.  This beer was then aged on either bourbon barrels, cedar wood, or a mixture of pasillo and ancho chiles before being also aged in a bourbon barrel.  Every treatment had a profound effect on the base beer and the ability to try them all side-by-side was really instrumental in being able to appreciate the effect of each one on the final product.  This same sort of approach was also demonstrated in their IPA series, in which the base beer of Jai Alai IPA was aged on mango or papaya (both in casks), as well as versions aged on cedar wood or a mixture of both cedar wood and juniper berries.  As with the Imperial Stout series, the ability of a small tweak to change a recipe was really an eye-opener.

Wayne Wambles (CCB), Alex Hall (Gotham Imbiber), and Joey Redner (CCB)

As an added bonus, I had a chance to talk to Cigar City founder, Joey Redner and head brewer Wayne Wambles about the ups and downs of success and the future of Cigar City Brewing.  I was curious about the fairly unique approach to brewing that Cigar City has taken.  According to Redner, “This is old-fashioned market research.  We’ve applied a bunch of different treatments to our base beers to see what works.  This has always been a part of the plan to develop some of our products.  As a former homebrewer, that sense of experimentation is part of the fun that drew me into brewing.”  But how many different things can you do to a given beer?  ”We have done enough things at this point to have a pretty good idea of what will be successful and what won’t.  When we try these out at the brewery, we encourage people to let us know what they think.  The good thing is that people are usually willing to tell us when something sucks!”  How often does that happen though?  ”We’ve had a few that were so bad, we wouldn’t even serve them”, Redner said with a chuckle.

BA Hunahpus, Marshal Zhukov and Humidor Series Marshal Zhukov

The ability to start pulling back on the experimental treatments has opened up tank space to let Wayne really start to have some fun.  According to Wambles, “My favorite part of this job is coming up with a new recipe and actually brewing it”.  To that end, we were fortunate to see a recently created brew, their Double Cream Ale.  This was intended to be an amped up version of that Pre-Prohibition standard, the Cream Ale.  Containing 12% corn in the mash, assertively hopped with Hallertauer Mittelfruh,  Tradition, and Czech Saaz and brewed to about 8.5% ABV using a colder fermentation (58°F) and their house yeast, the beer itself has a fairly fruity/spicy hop nose along with a light honeyed sweetness.  In true Cigar City fashion, this latest creation has already received a number of different treatments, having been aged on peaches, tangerines and pomegranates.

Joey chatting with Beer Fans

Given that they are brewing at capacity for their local market, I was curious about why they decided to branch out and move into the NYC market.  ”We didn’t have any plans to expand beyond Tampa initially.  When SKI called us to see about bringing us into New York, we said ‘no’.  But Mike was very professional and addressed every concern we had.  It was definitely a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease.  In the end, they made it so easy for us that we couldn’t keep saying no.”

So how about expansion plans?  The brewery has just purchased a number of 60 bbl tanks which should increase capacity by over 100%.  The plan is to pull back a little bit on the experimentation and really start to focus on the experiments that have been deemed a success and get them into bottles.  ”We’re hoping to concentrate more on bottle distribution, in order to get our beer to more people who want it”, said Redner.

It would be tough to ask for much more than that.