Cigar City Brew News

(i just want to say a HUGE thanks to the guys n gals at CCB for the most amazing year of beer in Florida. you rock!!!)

Ideas For The Coming Year

Warmer Winter, Winter Warmer is nearly read to bottle and other than Hunahpu's Imperial Stout we don't have a lot else planned for the rest of the year. Which brings us to what we plan to do for 2010. At the rate we are going we'll brew pretty close to 900 to a 1,000 barrels in our first year. That is damn good for the first year and we owe a world of thanks to all of our supporters. We couldn't have done it without you guys!

And now that we have a little more tank space, and in 2010 we'll have the capacity to do 12 oz bottles, we want to start looking at some new beers we've wanted to work into the lineup. One beer I really want to tackle in 2010 is a Spanish Cedar Gruit. No herbs, no spices...just wort and Spanish Cedar. Spanish Cedar is used to make cigar boxes because it is very resistant to rot and termites. There are also studies suggesting it also has antimicrobial properties. Which would make sense. So that is definitely one we are looking to tackle in 2010.

We also want to work in some lagers in 2010. Lagers are a passion of Wayne's and he has been itching to do some since day one. In order to keep them going we would have to have one lager be a year round beer. That was going to be Patio Pils, but the beer is nearly as expensive to make as our IPA and it just wont command the necassary price point to be better than a break-even beer. So we are looking at doing a Munich Heles as our year round lager. Patio Pils would be a deep summer seasonal. This would allow us to do a true Baltic Porter along with bocks, doppelbocks, a marzen and other lagers we want to do.

Another beer we have discussed is a true English Dark Mild. Not the monster-hopped Chaveta I did as a one-off but a flavorful, sesisonable English Dark Mild with slightly higher than standard English hop levels. Naturally any Dark Mild we did would be a natural for cask conditioning. And to cater to my own personal tastes I'd like to get a Dry Stout and a Milk Stout brewed this year. Along with all of our other seasonals from 2009. We might not get to them, but you never know what the year will bring.

In addition to these projects we plan to start ramping up production of a few different sours. They will mostly be darker beers, loosely in the oud bruin style, but we may also do some funkified Saisons. We still have to plan out some logistics for all of that, but it is definitely something we want to pursue in 2010.

Getting back to the 12 oz bottles we'll be producing in 2010 we have decided to bottle condition even our 12 oz product. There are a lot of reasons why, but from my standpoint they just flat taste and feel better that way. We'll have to approach this much differently than we have our bottle conditioned 750 ml bottles, but it will be a fun project to tackle. And the result will be sixers (or possibly 4 packs we haven't decided yet) of bottle-conditioned Jai Alai India Pale Ale.

Well that's all for now, just wanted to let everyone know what was on our plate for the coming year. We'd love to get some feedback if anyone has thoughts, comments or suggestions.

Cheers,
Joey Redner