The smoke has finally cleared from Fourth of July fireworks. The lingering smell of gunpowder brings about the nostalgia of my young beginnings with fireworks. I watched the fireworks display at Clearwater on the Fourth and was absolutely blown away.

Technology has come a long way since I lit my first bottle rocket. There were fireworks that took the shape of hearts, circles, spirals and my own personal favorite a three dimensional square. I realized for the first time that fireworks are not just a single sensory experience. They appeal to all of the five senses. The visual aspect is of course the one that most of us readily notice but if we were to say that is all that is taking place, I think that we would be missing something. We hear the sound that the fireworks make as they explode, smell the gunpowder in the air, feel the shockwave from the explosion and if you pay close attention even the smell of gunpowder gets somewhat transferred into our sense of taste. I guess the overall point is that each thing that we experience can be observed in multifaceted ways. This then brings us to beer.

I can open a single bottle of a Belgian made Trippel and share it with multiple drinking buddies and get absolutely different feedback from each person and I want to thank all of you for sharing that with us. We appreciated the companionship and the opportunity to share our work with you. This is the largest scale that these pilots were ever released before (even if you were able to have them at some of the homebrew meetings, I still feel they are even better at the source). We were surprised by the amount of people that attended the event and are thankful for that. We not only saw home brewers and enthusiasts from the beer community, we also shared the room with local craft brewers and members of the retail side of commercial brewing. I hope that all the attendees were able to meet and talk with the craft brewers and retailers if you have never entered a conversation with them before because our knowledge as a community is vast and invaluable (and they are great people).

Moving along, we are still waiting for construction permits. I don’t know how many times I will have to write this before things change but I can admit that I am getting weary of hitting the keyboard and watching the letters appear on the screen. Once we get the permits, the concrete side of the floors should be done in three days. After the concrete sets then it is on with the cementicious urethane floor covering and so on. I know that our engineer is working hard on this but now is crunch time. I wish we had them yesterday (two weeks ago would have been even better).

I packaged the Jai LaI PA today. For those of you that don’t know what this is, it is one our core beers and is an American IPA. I have already discussed the fact that it has 12 different hop additions but I haven’t really discussed the flavor of this beer. It is a hop bomb. The base bitter flip flops back and forth between citrus and pine and then at about three fourths of the way through the flavor profile it slips into apricots from the Simcoe hops. It is a thing of beauty in my opinion and at this point I am not worried about it being unique because I have yet to taste anything like it that is on the market. I am also proud of it because it is the first hoppy beer that I have made since I have been producing all the pilots and is sure to be my favorite. I am not sure when we are going to run it by the public but I am sure it will happen at some point in the near future. Meantime, we are going to put it to the test at the tasting at Joe’s house tomorrow night, (Tuesday).

We tasted the barley wine today and decided that the Irish yeast that we used gave up on this original gravity of 34 degrees plato monster. We are going to have to break out the old champagne yeast to finish this one off. I know that it fermented quite a bit because I saw it when it was active but it comes across like an alcoholic malta right now. How is that for local culture? Too sweet for us (even Joe who is possibly the biggest malt head on the planet). I will keep you posted on this one as it develops. When we make this one commercially, we will be using the White Labs high gravity yeast. It is supposed to be alcohol tolerant up to 25% ABV.

Going by Brian’s (Southern Brewing Supply) tomorrow to pick up some bottles. We are going to package off some of the kegs for mobile samples for future applications. I am also going to get the champagne yeast from Brian.

We met with the marketing team again today so that their artist could get a better feel for what we want to do. I feel like that went well but am really looking forward to seeing his ideas for the Double Nut Brown and the Jai Lai PA.

Currently, Alan from Premier Stainless is laying out our glycol lines for our fermenters, secondary heat exchanger and our cold liquor tank.

I made another mistake recently. I never measured the back right hand corner of the building to make sure that it was 16 feet so that the cooler would fit and you guessed it, it doesn’t. We had to move the cooler in towards the center of the building by 174” in order to get it to work. This changed the floor plan and gave us unexpected storage space in the back right hand corner of the building. Another lesson learned. I won’t make that mistake again. Overall, minimal changes have to be made to the floor drains and for that I am really thankful.

I believe that Joe is going to be posting some pictures that were taken during the sticker party so stay posted. I hope that you all had a great Fourth of July and until next time…

Take care and cheers,

Wayne Wambles

Head Brewer

Cigar City Brewing

A few pics from the stickering party:

Wayne enjoys the fruits of his labor.

Finished Kegs.



Our fancy banner courtesy of JJ Taylor.



After a grueling session of stickering, folks enjoy a beer.



Pleasant conversation.



Sebastien and Ryan like it!



Geiger, Ryan and Greg



Cigar City Brewing Hat Proof



More pics to come as they trickle in.

Cheers,
Joey Redner

p.s. I owe a special thanks to Gino Sierra, owner of the Brandon Mr. Empanada, for lugging out a tray of delicious mini-empanadas for our hungry, if not exactly hard working, stickering crew. Thanks, Gino.