Here is a brief update of what we have been doing at Cigar City Brewing. We are working on the floor layout for the brewery and have discussed beers that we were interested in piloting and piloted a couple with more on the way.

The first beer that we piloted is a Strong Scotch Ale. I believe that we will be calling it Big Sound Scotch Ale. It is a huge beer weighing in at 26.5 degrees plato. It might be a one off for the year as our standard strong scotch ale will be around 23 degrees plato so this might be a special batch that only sees production once a year as a specialty. It has a slight hint of smoke with big cherry note and dark sweet toffee in the aroma. This beer will be a super rich, malty brew that will knock your socks off alcohol wise and will intrigue your palate taste wise.

The second beer that we piloted is an Imperial Stout. We do not currently have a name for this one but it weighs in at 25.4 degrees plato and will be around 10.5 to 11 percent ABV. It is a traditional English style Imperial with all English hops and mostly English grain (there are a few specialty grains that the Brits don't make that I had to put into this one). Opaque black in color with huge roasted/chocolate notes and forward English hop varietal notes. The flavor will have big notes of roasted with cascading elements of chocolate and an upfront solid hop bitterness moving into blackstrap molasses elements with hints of fig and prune. It will be a real challenge to drink this one. I didn't caress the malt or hop bill and when it greets your palate you will definitely know it.

The other beers that we haven't gotten around to piloting yet are Double Nut Brown and Pre-Prohibition Pils.

The Double Nut Brown will not be like Tommyknockers because we won't be doing the maple thing. It has a combination of grains in it that will come across you palate like pistachio, cashews and roasted peanuts in the finish and the malt character will have a slightly forward chocolate note with a big medium/dark toffee sweetness to help balance out the dark malt and hops. We will be targeting 18 degrees plato for this one so it should be around 7.5-8 percent ABV.

The Pre-Pro Pils is something that we both feel has not seen enough commercial production and in an attempt to try and revive the style we are also slightly modernizing it slightly. The 6-row will be replaced with 2-row Pils malt and the Cluster will be replaced with Noble hop varietals. The corn is at 20% of the grist. With the changes that we have made to the recipe I would like to call it Premium Pre-Pro Pils but premium denotes no adjuncts so I was also considering calling it Modern instead of Premium. This one will weigh in at 6 percent ABV.

 All our pilots are being conducted on a 15 gallon three tiered system and I have to conduct two mashes in order to reach the correct gravity on the Double Brown, Strong Scotch Ale and Imperial Stout. The gravity and boil times have really been hell on my kettle but all for the sake of great beer. Hopefully you will be able to try some of our pilot batches if you are in the right place at the right time.

Thats all for now...
Take care and cheers,

 Wayne Wambles