Next is the American IPA. All American grain and hops but using the Thames Valley yeast. It will have 5 different hop varietals in it and will have 12 total hop additions. IBU’s are slaked to be 65-70, however, perceived will be something completely different. I love to play with hop bills for American IPAs so I really put some thought into the hop varietals and their placement in the beer. It won’t be a true pilot because we will be using Simcoe(can’t find them right now) for our commercial release but it will give me a point of perspective for what will stay and go in the future for this beer. Out of all the beers that we will be producing commercially in the future, I see this one as being the most problematic as far as obtaining raw materials(ahem, hops that is). We will do the best we can. This beer will most likely be my favorite beer that we make…an IPA for the American IPA lover. Almost forgot, 7.5-8% ABV(we aren’t messing around). I guess we will just skip Double IPA and go straight to Triple after this beer.

 

       And last but not least, we will be doing an English-style Barley Wine. The second runnings will go to make a completely different small beer. At this point I am thinking American or English Pale Ale or possibly a bitter of some sort. The Barley Wine will be 13-14% ABV. The grist is mostly English malt and the hop bill is all English hop varietals. We will more than likely have to bring in another yeast for the production of this beer due to the fact that Thames Valley is only alcohol tolerant up to 10%ABV. This will be an authentic English Barley Wine. The focus will be on the malt so don’t expect an American Barley Wine with hop components shredding the malt to pieces because you will be sadly disappointed.  I don’t want to get into too much detail on this beer…I would rather that you just taste it and tell me what you think.

 

         Proofs for the stickers are in and we will be moving to put them together this week. We are also meeting with a marketing company that will hopefully be able to help us put our ideas down on paper for bottle/keg stickers and promotional material. I am looking forward to this meeting. Working at Foothills made me learn to love bringing labels and concepts together step by step until you really have something that speaks to your consumer about your product. Still no info on the sticker party yet so just keep checking back. We do have 3 beers in the keg now though.

 

          I spoke with Bob, our engineer, today and he assured me that we were moving right along on schedule. We still are in line to pull permits by July. I was also told to day that our tanks won’t be arriving until the end of June to the very beginning of July. This slight change doesn’t really help us out because we will still have to put them somewhere in the warehouse out of the way until the floors are completed.

 

            I’m all out of info. I will discuss how the pilots went and other odds and ends next week. Hope you are all doing well and I look forward to sharing a beer with you in the future(preferably mine).

 

 

Take care and Prost,

Wayne Wambles
Head Brewer
Cigar City Brewing