54: Wayne's Weekly Update 10-29-08
When I walked outside today nothing was frozen over. When I looked in the sky there were no pigs flying about. There was nothing about today that seemed surreal or like a waking dream. I pinched myself and it hurt. That is when I realized that I was awake and hadn’t gone to any netherworld and that it was a distinct reality that we finally were given our construction permit today.
After 8 weeks of putting all these plans together that mutated time and time again, after listening to the construction division review board with my eyes glazing over in a concentrated attempt to make light of what needed to be changed or conveyed in said plan that they didn’t approve x time around and after asking myself if I had maybe died at some point while living in North Carolina and not realized it and ended up moving down to Tampa which was dead set on being my everlasting hell since it would allow me to make great pilots yet never allow me to brew beers commercially, WE HAVE A CONSTRUCTION PERMIT!
It has been a long hard road filled with engineers, contractors and review board members. It would be an understatement to say that I learned something from all this. From beginning to move toward the start of construction to now, we have tallied up a good 7 months of time. I am relieved to say the least but I personally feel very privileged to have been able to stumble through all of this because if we ever decide to expand then I will be able to talk the same lingo and comprehend what the general contractor is saying or recommending. Having said all that, should you find yourself in the same position as us trying to start a brewery, hire a general contractor or it will cost you time and we all know that time is money.
We are on to the next stage now. We have to hire a general contractor (yes, there is no getting around it) to pull our change of use permits and our fire inspection permits before our subcontractors can start pulling their permits. The only real complication with this is that it requires money. We pay said figurehead to pull said permits then said subcontractors pull their permits and we are on to construction. For the newbies that are planning on starting their own breweries, there are also several fees that must be paid prior to the general contractor pulling the first two permits. These are the transportation impact fee ($1200…this is because we most assuredly will be disrupting the flow of traffic so we have to pay for it), the permit fee ($130…because the city has to get paid…right) and the final inspection fee ($200…we have to pay those hard working inspectors to tell us how we have deviated from the plans and then laugh in our faces when we are begging them to let us start production and the sidewalk on said plan is ¼” off). This totals up to a little over $1500. I wish we could have just paid them $1500 and started construction back in July or August. Damn the flaming hoop syndrome!
The good news doesn’t stop at the construction permit approval. We are also officially licensed by the state and the feds now. We started filling out label approval forms on Tuesday for the majority of the mock ups that you have seen. Some of them will require a statement of process since they are not on the federal list of beer styles so we won’t be able to put them together until we come up with a company letterhead which has to appear at the top of the statement of process notes. The Guava Grove falls under this category and so will the Humidor Series since they both use production ideas that are unique to the federal beer style listings. I foresee many of our special seasonals needing a statement of process form as well since many of the new ideas are starting to sharply deviate from traditional styles in the eyes of the feds. What does that mean? That my job is becoming a hell of a lot more interesting mostly and I am fairly certain that many brewers would kill to have the amount of creative freedom that I have been issued. I wish the public had come around to complex small batch beer in the early 2000’s because I was ready back then but that would not have landed me at CCB and I think that this is where I belong.
We added one more pilot to the first five. It will be another testimony to local Tampa culture. We are going to call it Café Con Leche Stout. If you are not familiar with the local drink then I urge you to go to your favorite Cuban sandwich shop and order one with breakfast or prior to receiving your food. The beans that are used to make café con leche are roasted more aggressively than many espresso beans but the process yields different results than espresso in my opinion. Café con leche is a 50% blend of concentrated coffee (we can most likely call it Cuban espresso) and steamed milk. I was expecting it to come across as semi sweet black coffee with sweet cream but I must confess that I was mistaken. The aroma is very nutty…almost toasty and the role that the steamed milk plays does not lend any sweetness to this beverage. It is very easy to drink and very creamy. Overall it is a great local tradition that sees its beginnings with local cigar rolling factories that were all around the Tampa area years ago.
The locals took their coffee very seriously and if you talked poorly about another mans’ coffee then you could end up getting stabbed or even shot. The rich history of this beverage brought us to the realization that we needed to incorporate it into a beer. Café Con Leche Milk Stout is the result. It is a sweet stout that is brewed with a ridiculous amount of caramel malts and comes damn close to being an Imperial Milk Stout. Following primary fermentation, the beer is then racked onto Café Con Leche roast coffee from our oldest local roaster in the middle of historic downtown Ybor, Naviera. 90% of the time this is the exact coffee used at traditional Cuban restaurants or coffee houses. The beer is then racked into a final tank where special ingredients are added and then on to sipping the finished product post carbonation. I am sure this will be a nice addition to our already local culture oriented line up.
Ben and I racked the Mayan Chocolate Imperial Stout, Bleeding Heart Brown Ale, Imperial Pumpkin and the Oatmeal Rye India Brown Ale into the keg or secondary. That was a very pleasant experience to say the least. I noticed that the yeast beds on these four beers were substantially bigger than some of my earlier pilots. I have made some changes to the way that I make yeast starters now and this is the result of that most assuredly. The fermentations were very vigorous and rapid even though I had the temperatures cranked down below 60F during initial fermentation.
The Bleeding Heart Brown Ale is the most sessionable beer out of all the pilots. It weighs in at about 5.6ABV and has a forward spice aroma with some toasty malt and hints of chocolate underneath. The first sip yields a sweet toasted bread maltiness riddled with complex Christmas spice notes with hints of chocolate and a slight touch of roasted barley (that actually comes from the tea that I added and not from the mash) and then fades into a smooth spice lead out with the malt never relinquishing all control.
The Oatmeal Rye India Brown Ale is the hoppiest of the bunch. Even though it is about 90 IBU’s it never gives up the malt backbone. The aroma is pine, citrus, rye, caramel, hints of chocolate and toasted/nutty notes. Dark caramel notes and a piney/woody/citrusy note are up front and then the rye comes along and lends spiciness to the mix which moves into threshold undefined dark malt notes and pinnings of chocolate which then shift back into tangerine and apricot with more chocolate and rye in the finish and then finally leading to a pine/apricot infused chocolate rye finale. Yes, I am listening to jazz right now (John Coltrane – Giant Steps) and no I am not sipping one but I wish that I were.
The Imperial Pumpkin is one of the best pumpkin beers that I have ever made. It is a little young right now so it comes across hot in the finish but then again what can one expect from a 9% beer that is less than a month old. It is orange with an orange head (yes orange…to this day I have never seen an orange head on a beer unless it had food coloring in it). The orange head is due to the fact that I used a ridiculous amount of pumpkin in this beer. I most likely could have gotten by with 30 – 40% less but what the hell. If you can’t test the limits then was it really worth it? The nose screams freshly whipped heavy cream, pumpkin and pumpkin pie spices. The flavor profile is an elaborate mesh of sweet whipped cream, pumpkin pie spices and pumpkin that lead you to a heated alcohol finish (needs more age) and notes of pumpkin skin that come across as rindy. I was proud to hear Ben say that he thought that the nose on mine was as good or better than the Southern Tier Pumking. Time will tell and I think that time is on my side with this one.
Finally, the Mayan Chocolate Imperial Stout is a solid imperial stout as it is but when you throw all those spices and chocolate in the mix you get an absolutely astonishing beer. The aroma is dominated by dark milk chocolate with light notes of cinnamon, vanilla and wisps of dark fruit and peppers. The first sip is a chocolate lovers dream come true. Big semi sweet chocolate notes lunge forward with notes of vanilla and cinnamon infusion. Dark fruit and pepper (very little heat from peppers…it adds more of a dark fruit acidity than heat) notes emerge that kiss the coffee like expression from the roasted barley notes with unmeasured erotic palatial ecstasy. The hops start to firm up the finish with the chocolate unrelentingly expressing that it can not be forgotten. It is liquid love ladies and gentlemen. Seek this out at all costs! I might have just designed the first true aphrodisiac! Just thinking about this beer makes me tremble (lol)!
That crazy Saison…it won’t stop fermenting. I wonder if it has anything to do with adding 2.5 lbs of deseeded skin on scuppernong grapes to the secondary? It smells just like I wanted it to, local wine mixed with local beer. I think that things are going to get a little wild up in here soon or later but I don’t smell it yet. It could take months to pick that character up. I am patient so I am going to wait until it finishes fermentation and then move it to a keg and let it sit for another 4 weeks at 75F and then slow cool down and carbonation. I will just have to keep posting about this one as I see it being a long term experiment.
Here I am into page 4. Well that is a first. I think that I have ran out of things to discuss so I am going to say farewell until next time. I am sorry that this post took so long to reach you but I feel no need to put up a petty post when nothing is really going on. The permitting and licensing have been great news and I will continue to discuss construction and so on. There will be plenty more lessons to learn and I will do my best to share them with all that are interested.
Take care,
Wayne Wambles
Head Brewer
Cigar City Brewing
After 8 weeks of putting all these plans together that mutated time and time again, after listening to the construction division review board with my eyes glazing over in a concentrated attempt to make light of what needed to be changed or conveyed in said plan that they didn’t approve x time around and after asking myself if I had maybe died at some point while living in North Carolina and not realized it and ended up moving down to Tampa which was dead set on being my everlasting hell since it would allow me to make great pilots yet never allow me to brew beers commercially, WE HAVE A CONSTRUCTION PERMIT!
It has been a long hard road filled with engineers, contractors and review board members. It would be an understatement to say that I learned something from all this. From beginning to move toward the start of construction to now, we have tallied up a good 7 months of time. I am relieved to say the least but I personally feel very privileged to have been able to stumble through all of this because if we ever decide to expand then I will be able to talk the same lingo and comprehend what the general contractor is saying or recommending. Having said all that, should you find yourself in the same position as us trying to start a brewery, hire a general contractor or it will cost you time and we all know that time is money.
We are on to the next stage now. We have to hire a general contractor (yes, there is no getting around it) to pull our change of use permits and our fire inspection permits before our subcontractors can start pulling their permits. The only real complication with this is that it requires money. We pay said figurehead to pull said permits then said subcontractors pull their permits and we are on to construction. For the newbies that are planning on starting their own breweries, there are also several fees that must be paid prior to the general contractor pulling the first two permits. These are the transportation impact fee ($1200…this is because we most assuredly will be disrupting the flow of traffic so we have to pay for it), the permit fee ($130…because the city has to get paid…right) and the final inspection fee ($200…we have to pay those hard working inspectors to tell us how we have deviated from the plans and then laugh in our faces when we are begging them to let us start production and the sidewalk on said plan is ¼” off). This totals up to a little over $1500. I wish we could have just paid them $1500 and started construction back in July or August. Damn the flaming hoop syndrome!
The good news doesn’t stop at the construction permit approval. We are also officially licensed by the state and the feds now. We started filling out label approval forms on Tuesday for the majority of the mock ups that you have seen. Some of them will require a statement of process since they are not on the federal list of beer styles so we won’t be able to put them together until we come up with a company letterhead which has to appear at the top of the statement of process notes. The Guava Grove falls under this category and so will the Humidor Series since they both use production ideas that are unique to the federal beer style listings. I foresee many of our special seasonals needing a statement of process form as well since many of the new ideas are starting to sharply deviate from traditional styles in the eyes of the feds. What does that mean? That my job is becoming a hell of a lot more interesting mostly and I am fairly certain that many brewers would kill to have the amount of creative freedom that I have been issued. I wish the public had come around to complex small batch beer in the early 2000’s because I was ready back then but that would not have landed me at CCB and I think that this is where I belong.
We added one more pilot to the first five. It will be another testimony to local Tampa culture. We are going to call it Café Con Leche Stout. If you are not familiar with the local drink then I urge you to go to your favorite Cuban sandwich shop and order one with breakfast or prior to receiving your food. The beans that are used to make café con leche are roasted more aggressively than many espresso beans but the process yields different results than espresso in my opinion. Café con leche is a 50% blend of concentrated coffee (we can most likely call it Cuban espresso) and steamed milk. I was expecting it to come across as semi sweet black coffee with sweet cream but I must confess that I was mistaken. The aroma is very nutty…almost toasty and the role that the steamed milk plays does not lend any sweetness to this beverage. It is very easy to drink and very creamy. Overall it is a great local tradition that sees its beginnings with local cigar rolling factories that were all around the Tampa area years ago.
The locals took their coffee very seriously and if you talked poorly about another mans’ coffee then you could end up getting stabbed or even shot. The rich history of this beverage brought us to the realization that we needed to incorporate it into a beer. Café Con Leche Milk Stout is the result. It is a sweet stout that is brewed with a ridiculous amount of caramel malts and comes damn close to being an Imperial Milk Stout. Following primary fermentation, the beer is then racked onto Café Con Leche roast coffee from our oldest local roaster in the middle of historic downtown Ybor, Naviera. 90% of the time this is the exact coffee used at traditional Cuban restaurants or coffee houses. The beer is then racked into a final tank where special ingredients are added and then on to sipping the finished product post carbonation. I am sure this will be a nice addition to our already local culture oriented line up.
Ben and I racked the Mayan Chocolate Imperial Stout, Bleeding Heart Brown Ale, Imperial Pumpkin and the Oatmeal Rye India Brown Ale into the keg or secondary. That was a very pleasant experience to say the least. I noticed that the yeast beds on these four beers were substantially bigger than some of my earlier pilots. I have made some changes to the way that I make yeast starters now and this is the result of that most assuredly. The fermentations were very vigorous and rapid even though I had the temperatures cranked down below 60F during initial fermentation.
The Bleeding Heart Brown Ale is the most sessionable beer out of all the pilots. It weighs in at about 5.6ABV and has a forward spice aroma with some toasty malt and hints of chocolate underneath. The first sip yields a sweet toasted bread maltiness riddled with complex Christmas spice notes with hints of chocolate and a slight touch of roasted barley (that actually comes from the tea that I added and not from the mash) and then fades into a smooth spice lead out with the malt never relinquishing all control.
The Oatmeal Rye India Brown Ale is the hoppiest of the bunch. Even though it is about 90 IBU’s it never gives up the malt backbone. The aroma is pine, citrus, rye, caramel, hints of chocolate and toasted/nutty notes. Dark caramel notes and a piney/woody/citrusy note are up front and then the rye comes along and lends spiciness to the mix which moves into threshold undefined dark malt notes and pinnings of chocolate which then shift back into tangerine and apricot with more chocolate and rye in the finish and then finally leading to a pine/apricot infused chocolate rye finale. Yes, I am listening to jazz right now (John Coltrane – Giant Steps) and no I am not sipping one but I wish that I were.
The Imperial Pumpkin is one of the best pumpkin beers that I have ever made. It is a little young right now so it comes across hot in the finish but then again what can one expect from a 9% beer that is less than a month old. It is orange with an orange head (yes orange…to this day I have never seen an orange head on a beer unless it had food coloring in it). The orange head is due to the fact that I used a ridiculous amount of pumpkin in this beer. I most likely could have gotten by with 30 – 40% less but what the hell. If you can’t test the limits then was it really worth it? The nose screams freshly whipped heavy cream, pumpkin and pumpkin pie spices. The flavor profile is an elaborate mesh of sweet whipped cream, pumpkin pie spices and pumpkin that lead you to a heated alcohol finish (needs more age) and notes of pumpkin skin that come across as rindy. I was proud to hear Ben say that he thought that the nose on mine was as good or better than the Southern Tier Pumking. Time will tell and I think that time is on my side with this one.
Finally, the Mayan Chocolate Imperial Stout is a solid imperial stout as it is but when you throw all those spices and chocolate in the mix you get an absolutely astonishing beer. The aroma is dominated by dark milk chocolate with light notes of cinnamon, vanilla and wisps of dark fruit and peppers. The first sip is a chocolate lovers dream come true. Big semi sweet chocolate notes lunge forward with notes of vanilla and cinnamon infusion. Dark fruit and pepper (very little heat from peppers…it adds more of a dark fruit acidity than heat) notes emerge that kiss the coffee like expression from the roasted barley notes with unmeasured erotic palatial ecstasy. The hops start to firm up the finish with the chocolate unrelentingly expressing that it can not be forgotten. It is liquid love ladies and gentlemen. Seek this out at all costs! I might have just designed the first true aphrodisiac! Just thinking about this beer makes me tremble (lol)!
That crazy Saison…it won’t stop fermenting. I wonder if it has anything to do with adding 2.5 lbs of deseeded skin on scuppernong grapes to the secondary? It smells just like I wanted it to, local wine mixed with local beer. I think that things are going to get a little wild up in here soon or later but I don’t smell it yet. It could take months to pick that character up. I am patient so I am going to wait until it finishes fermentation and then move it to a keg and let it sit for another 4 weeks at 75F and then slow cool down and carbonation. I will just have to keep posting about this one as I see it being a long term experiment.
Here I am into page 4. Well that is a first. I think that I have ran out of things to discuss so I am going to say farewell until next time. I am sorry that this post took so long to reach you but I feel no need to put up a petty post when nothing is really going on. The permitting and licensing have been great news and I will continue to discuss construction and so on. There will be plenty more lessons to learn and I will do my best to share them with all that are interested.
Take care,
Wayne Wambles
Head Brewer
Cigar City Brewing
Awesome! Stop writing, start building!
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I read this post and felt compelled to drive by after work (CC brewery is near my office) and Wayne and Joey were cool enough to let me sample a few brews and shoot the breeze with me for a bit, mucho appreciated!!
Anyone reading this: prepare to be excited. As soon as you uncap some of these you're in for a treat. Amazing head on ALL the beers, great nose, awesome balance, really impressive range and contrast/compliment in the flavors, this is going to be huge. I particularly loved the Bleeding Heart Brown and the Imperial Pumpkin, both were the best of that style I'd ever had (pumpkin and brown). Really enjoyed the beers, really enjoyed talking with these guys, thanks again!!!
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Anytime Todd and thank you for the positive feedback!
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The blog was absolutely fantastic! Lots of great information and inspiration, both of which we all need!thanks
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