Cigar City Brewing

Official Tumblr for Cigar City Brewing. Hecho a Mano. Born in Tampa, Florida.

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Hunahpu’s Day 2017 Early Access Pass

Your Chance to Skip the Line & Help Raise Funds for a Great Charity

For the second year in a row, Cigar City Brewing is offering 100 Early Access Passes to skip the line and get into Hunahpu's Day 2017 15 minutes before everyone else! That’s 15 minutes of exploring the park, scoring merch and whale hunting.

Early Access Pass guests will even have a special entrance off of the Riverw Walk by the Marriott Waterside.

The best part of this, 100% of the sales from these passes will benefit the Pediatric Cancer Foundation http://events.fastercure.org/goto/CigarCity.

Passes are $50 each, and you can purchase up to 2 passes per transaction.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Only 100 tickets will be available and must be used in combination with a Hunahpu’s Day 2017 ticket. If you do not have a ticket to Hunahpu’s Day 2017, you will not be admitted into the park with this Early Access Pass.

Looking for other ways to donate to the Pediatric Cancer Foundation? Check out our Cut for a Cure fundraiser.  

Date: 3/11/2017 Time: 10:45am Entering from the Riverwalk by the Marriott Waterside Price: Tickets are $50 with 100% of ticket sales being donated to the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation Limitations: Only 100 tickets will be available and must be used in combination with a Hunahpu’s Day 2017 ticket. If you do not have a ticket to Hunahpu’s Day 2017, you will not be admitted into the park with this Early Access Pass.

You can purchase your early access tickets here.

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Excited to open your Hunahpu's Wristband Box? Here are a couple of reminders:

1) These Bands Do Not Come Off - Do not put on your Wristband Until the Day of the Event

We know it’s exciting but want to insure that the RFID works properly the day of the event, so please try to resist the urge!

If you have accidentally put on your band already, please contact the Vendini help desk:

Email: [email protected] Phone: [phone]

2) Bottle Pick-up Starts at 9am

Our boxes were created prior to moving up the time so don't sweat, you can still nab your Hunahpu's at 9am.

Bottle pick-up is at the Marriott Waterside Hotel from 9 AM until the end of the festival.  You must enter the hotel from the Riverwalk, not through the hotel lobby.  Reentry to the festival is permitted after picking up your bottles, however you may not reenter the festival with those bottles.  If you are picking your bottles up early in the day, we suggest dropping them off at a hotel room or your home and returning to the festival.

3) Wristbands Need to be Registered Prior to the Event

Visit hunahpusday.com to register your wristband. Then just remember to grab it and a valid photo ID and you are all set to celebrate at Hunahpu’s Day 2017.

Unsure of the other event details? Check out the video below with El Lector, Neil Callaghan.

Please reach out to Vendini with all other wristband questions! Cheers & We are looking forward to seeing you 3/11!

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El Catador Club #6 - Bottle #1: Absolutely Okay

We are truly excited to release the first bottle in the 6th Edition of our El Catador Barrel-aged Beer Club, Absolutely Okay.

This International Strong Dark Ale was brewed with our friends from Belgium's De Struise Brouwers and aged in bourbon barrels. De Struise's deft hand in recipe creation has combined with Cigar City's adroit barrel aging skills to create this monumental collaboration that is superlatively, unquestionably, and indisputably "Absolutely OK".

ABV: 12.9% OG: 22 IBUs: 40 SRM: 36

Love barrel-aged beer? Join our club lottery!

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Your Support Helps Us Keep Pushing the Boundaries of Excellence

Quite simply, we are able to accomplish what we have because of our loyal base of fans and enthusiasts encouraging and challenging us to make the best beer possible. While internally we took a moment to raise a pint to each other, we also wanted to take this second to raise a pint to you. Cheers & Thank You!

Best Brewers In The World for the Year 2016

STOUT is made up of the following styles: Stout | Dry Stout | Sweet Stout | Foreign Stout 8) Siren / Cigar City Caribbean Chocolate Cake (Barrel-aged) Foreign Stout 14) Siren / Cigar City Caribbean Chocolate Cake Foreign Stout STRONG STOUT is made up of the following styles: Imperial Stout 4) Hunahpu's Imperial Stout - Double Barrel-aged Imperial Stout 15) Hunahpu's Imperial Stout Imperial Stout IMPERIAL, BALTIC PORTER is made up of the following styles: Baltic Porter | Imperial Porter | 12) Outskirts Imperial Porter Best By Style for the Year 2016

Best Places For Beer By Subregion for the Year 2016

Best Places For Beer - Country [The very best places to have a beer in the world] for the Year 2016

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El Catador Club: Past, Present and Future

El Catador members... From the day we introduced our El Catador Barrel-aged Beer Club in 2013, our goal was to foster a community of beer lovers who would appreciate our most ambitious and interesting projects and to include as many Cigar City supporters as possible in this community.  We've been vigilant about the quality of the beer first and foremost; every beer we've released to our El Catador Club members we've been proud of, and we feel that we've always succeeded in our primary goal of producing world-class beer. 

We've also been attentive to the customer service portion of the club.  Those who have been with us from Club #1 have seen major improvements to the sign-up process, bottle pick-ups, trustee assignments and nearly every other facet of our interaction with Club members.  You have also seen club editions of various lengths; some have lasted as long as 17 months and some club editions have seen bottles are released in a very short period of time. As part of our continuing customer service focus for the club, we'd like to take this opportunity to tell the story of our barrel-aging process, explain the reasons behind the different timelines and offer some expectations for the El Catador Club for 2017.

Every step of the production process in creating barrel-aged beers is an exercise in patience and balance.  We're currently producing as much beer as humanly possible at our facility in Tampa, meaning that the continuing production of our year-round beers like Jai Alai does have a direct impact on our ability to produce seasonal, specialty and barrel-aged projects.  If it's going to prevent us from supplying the market with our core beers, some of those specialty beers get put on the back burner, so to say.  When we're able to, our Production team will squeeze new barrel-aged projects on to our schedule to make sure we've got a succession of beers for our club members, and sometimes those opportunities to produce beer destined for barrels fall more closely together than others.  Further complicating production is the need to make enough beer to supply the entirety of the Club.  It's not as easy as scheduling a single, small batch of beer like you may see in our Tasting Room; we need to make enough beer to supply the entire club and have some wiggle room for unplanned circumstances like spillage, failed barrels, and other minor catastrophes.

Once the beer has been produced and transferred to barrels, a variety of factors can contribute to the speed (or lack thereof) that a barrel-aged beer will be ready to bottle.  The condition of the barrels when we acquire them varies from strong, clean and wet to leaky, dirty and dry. A barrel that's been emptied of a wine or spirit very recently will be able to hold beer much more quickly than an older barrel that will require cleaning or rehydrating and will impart spirit character much more quickly.  The temperature and humidity of the environment where barrels are stored is critical to the speed of barrel aging and with our current barrel storage area we are certainly at the whim of our Florida climate.  Finally, the ability for wood to harbor beer spoiling organisms like brettanomyces, wild saccharomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus and acetobacter also make wood-aged beer fraught with danger.  We've had unfortunate run-ins with each of these organisms and they've colluded to ruin some very promising beers.  When we have a leaky barrel or a dry barrel, or have to reject a barrel due to the presence of spoilage organisms it has a tangible effect on the timeline of the El Catador Club.

Once the beer is in barrels, we are essentially at the whim of the beers.   Sometimes we find that the wood and spirit character that we're looking for from a barrel is present in a few weeks, sometimes it can take several months.  Even batches of the same beer in the same type of barrels can develop differently and finding the sweet spot in time between different barrels is one of the satisfying parts of the art-science balance in beer production that we love.  Frequent tasting panels are conducted to monitor the progress of these barrel-aged beers and though we try to anticipate how quickly different beers will mature, we find over and over again that "the beer is ready when the beer is ready", to quote Brewmaster Wayne Wambles.

As a result of all of these colluding elements, we've always been hesitant to set any guarantees on club timeline.  We've come to a point, however, where we need to set some expectations to fulfill our commitment to customer service.  Our goal for 2017 is to release fifteen bottles to our El Catador Club members before year's end.  This is indeed a goal, not a guarantee. We will never release beer that we're not 100% proud of and that is not of the highest quality and will forever be at the whim of the above-listed factors.  We do hope that setting a very coarse timeline for the next year's club will help our members prepare for bottle pickups and plan their finances a little more accurately than in the past. What else can you expect from the El Catador Club in 2017?  More ambitious beer projects, more El Catador Club exclusive events, more improvements to our online portal and in-person pick-up processes.  We've always aimed to create a bottle club that we ourselves would like to be a part of, and that means constantly evaluating our processes and procedures.   If something is going to make El Catador Club membership a better, more valuable experience, we'll try and make it happen.

We at Cigar City want to thank you again for your patience and understanding as the El Catador Club develops and hope that this email has shed some light on the past, present and future of the club.  If you have any additional questions please email [email protected] and we'll answer them as honestly and quickly as possible.  Here's to a great 2016, a better 2017 and to the best fans and supporters that a brewery could ask for.  Prost! -Cigar City Brewing

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Cigar City Returns to It's Dark Whim with Capricho Oscuro

Having released over 800 individual beers since our first batch of beer back in 2009, we at Cigar City have always found satisfaction in new and original projects.  At the same time, we take occasion from time to time to revisit some old favorites and breathe new life into some classic projects.  It's in this spirit that we would like to re-introduce the Capricho Oscuro series.

Translating roughly to "dark whim", the name of this series of barrel-aged beers offers some insight into the nature of the beers that make up the Capricho Oscuro series.  When a mischievous feeling gets the better of our Production team, they'll hand select individual beers, blend them together and age the blended beer in wooden barrels for an extended period of time.  We've found that the blending and aging processes reveal overlooked flavors and aromas and create new depth of character for the individual beers and for the blended beer.

The origin of the series pre-dates our first commercially released beers.  After coming into a virgin American oak barrel, Brewmaster Wayne Wambles and Founder/CEO Joey Redner took some pilot batches of now-favorite Cigar City beers including Marshal Zhukov's, Bolita and Big Sound, blended them to taste and aged the blend in the barrel, creating Cigar City's first barrel-aged release.   Even before our first full-scale batch of beer had been brewed (for those keeping score at home, that first full-scale batch was a batch of Maduro Brown Ale brewed on January 30th, 2009), our internal standard had been set for the intensity and complexity that we expect from barrel-aged Cigar City beer.

This edition of Capricho Oscuro offers a new take on the series.  Rather than blend several beers and then barrel age the resulting blend, we're taking beer that's already been aged in barrels and combine them post-barrel.  What we've ended up with is a one-of-a-kind strong ale that's been aged in four different barrels: three different types of bourbon barrels and a brandy barrel.  The threads of the base beer each contribute something distinct and idiosyncratic to the blend, which boasts notes of candied prunes, tobacco, red apple and chicory root.

Look for Capricho Oscuro exclusively in the Cigar City Tasting Room in 12 oz. bottles, a rare format for Cigar City that is truly suitable for a rare beer like this one.*  This small batch will not last long and the Capricho Oscuro series will not again be seen until our dark whim gets the best of us!

*The 12 oz. bottle happens to fit wonderfully into a holiday stocking.  Just saying!

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Brewmaster Wayne Wambles is a consummate storyteller, and beer is his preferred storytelling medium.  For the entirety of his career he’s used malted barley, yeast, water, hops and a myriad of special ingredients and processes to tell stories of places, people and experiences while using those ingredients to also create new narratives in the world of beer.  Sometimes that narrative needs to be told in a series of beers, and our Dark Woods Series is a great example of using a suite of beers as a tool to tell a story.

Through years of study and hands-on experience, Wayne has become a leading authority aging beer in wooden vessels and using wood in his recipes to express idiosyncratic aspects of those recipes (so much so that he was asked to write the introduction to Peter Bouckaert and Dick Cantwell’s recent book “Wood & Beer: A Brewer’s Guide”).  Searching for the proper forum to further explore the world of wood-aged beers, Wayne has developed The Dark Woods Series, a succession of beers dark in color and aged on wood of various origins and formats.  In the past, the series has utilized wood sourced from the United States, France and Hungary and has explored the use of the same wood toasted to different levels of color and flavor to enhance different flavors and qualities of the oak.  For this iteration, Wayne has selected padauk wood from Central Africa and sugar maple sourced from the northeastern US.

This year’s Dark Woods began life as a svelt Strong Brown Ale of 7.3% ABV brewed with Golden Promise, a complex base malt from the United Kingdom, and five other special malt varieties for a depth of flavor not commonly found in the style.  Additionally, the ale was hopped (and dry-hopped) with HBC 472, an experimental hop that adds flavors of coconut and a rustic woodiness to the dark, rich beer.  After primary fermentation was completed, African padauk and sugar maple spirals were added to the beer to impart woody, rustic notes and subtle hints of brown sugar as well as wood tannins for texture.  Rich aromas of molasses, bread crust and toffee in the finished beer are complemented by more subtle notes of vanilla and coconut on the nose, while a formidable maltiness on the tongue hints at bitter chocolate and and black licorice. Tannins and vanilla character from the wood and an herbal hop character bring the formidable brown ale into perfect balance, making the beer at once approachable and worthy of careful consideration.

The process for adding wood to The Dark Woods beers is as unique as the beers themselves.  Rather than age the beer in wooden vessels, a process that is fraught with the dangers of oxidation and infection, we instead use wooden spirals.  Measuring in at 48” long, these spirals are made from the same wood that is used for barrel staves.  The spirals go into a unique vessel called a Spinbot fashioned at Cigar City from an old beer serving tank.  Our team fitted the tank with inlets and outlets to create a vessel capable of continual beer re-circulation.  After the spirals are put into the tank, a pump moves the beer from the fermenter and into the tank where it’s spun at 50 cycles per second over the spirals before being sent back into the fermentation vessel.  This continual re-circulation of beer over the spirals allows us to use fewer spirals and complete the wood-ageing process in a significantly shorter period of time.

We at Cigar City are proud to share this unique beer series with our friends in and out of a wooded setting.  We recommend enjoying Dark Woods Imperial Brown Ale around a smokey campfire, under an oak tree heavy with Spanish moss, or while taking in a canopy of wintertime constellations far from the bright city lights.  Here’s to beer in the dark!

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Tampa, Florida is a city rich with history and the locals do not take that history for granted. Cigar City Brewing is one such local business that keeps the history of Tampa alive. Aptly named after the Cuban cigar production brought in by Vincente Ybor, Cigar City Brewing uses the history of the city to guide their work. Take, for example, Cigar City’s “El Lector” Neil Callaghan, whose title was inspired by the “Lectores” in cigar factories. "El Lector" was the person whose job it was to inform and entertain the cigar rollers. As Neil shares with us, history also influences the actual brewing done at Cigar City.

“... Maduro, which is a dark wrap around a cigar...is our brown ale. So a lot of the names, a lot of the approach, and a lot of the special ingredients do have that tie-in back to Cuba.”

Neil and his dog, Egg (Cigar City's official greeter) take their jobs very seriously. Neil has tasted more than 5,000 beers and traveled around the world to learn and share information with other brewers.

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“You know what they've got in Florida?  Jai alai!" - George Costanza, 1996

Unless you're a Seinfeld devotee, a crossword puzzle enthusiast or a native Floridian, you may never have heard of "the merry game" of jai alai before trying our flagship American IPA.  We at Cigar City see the myriad of interesting pronunciations as proof positive that the general populace just isn't familiar with the game that inspired the beer, nor are many aware that it was inspired by a game at all.  "Jey- a-lay", "juh-alley", "jolly olley", all have been ordered with complete confidence at bars all over the great state of Florida*.  What is jai alai, and why has Cigar City named a beer after it?

Originating in the Basque region of Spain, jai alai's rules aren't dissimilar to those of racketball with players throwing a ball against a wall, volleying back and forth until an opponent misses a catch.  The ball, called a pelota, is launched using a cesta, a large banana-shaped scoop attached to a players' hand that allows the ball to be hurled at speeds of over 130 miles per hour.  We've always liked drawing on unique references when naming our beer, especially when they relate to our home state but before the 1980's, jai alai would certainly not have been an esoteric reference.  Arenas where the game was played (called frontons) could be found in Miami, Ocala, Ft. Pierce and Tampa, where weekend bouts could draw over 15,000 attendees.  Parimutuel wagering was a draw for many but the game itself, dubbed "the fastest game on earth" thanks to the high velocity of the pelota, was the real attraction.  By the 1980's, however, the expansion of major league sports in Florida, the growth of the state lottery system and a players' strike in the 1980's took fans' and gamblers' focus away from the "merry game".  Tampa's fronton, located just five miles from our brewery, itself closed in 1998, leaving jai alai only a memory to Tampanians**.

When Cigar City founder Joey Redner and Brewmaster Wayne Wambles were developing recipes and names for their first few beers in 2008, the name "Jai Alai" for an IPA was suggested because of it's reference to Tampa history and it's familiarity to Florida natives.  Released as the second Cigar City beer in April of 2009 (the release being Maduro Brown Ale, for you trivia buffs out there), the beer's popularity surprised even Joey and Wayne and quickly became the young brewery's best selling beer.  A switch from 12 oz. glass bottles to 12 oz. cans in 2012 helped fuel the brand's growth and solidify it as Cigar City's flagship beer and providing many drinker's first taste of our ever-growing family of beers.

The beer itself is as bold and flavorful an IPA as you're likely to find on any coast.  Hopped with six different hops including Amarillo and Motueka, it's dry-hopped with Simcoe for a distinct spicy, black pepper-like flavor and a citrus quality reminiscent of ripe tangerines. At 7.5% ABV, it's slightly stronger than other IPA's but it's alcohol content serves to better express peach and orange-like esters from the English ale yeast used to ferment this incredibly flavorful IPA.  Now accounting for over half of overall beer production at Cigar City, a staggering 120,000 cans of Jai Alai are packaged in a typical production week at our Tampa brewery.

From athletic footnote to flagship beer, we at Cigar City raise our glasses to "the merry game", to Florida and to Jai Alai IPA, the heart and soul of our brewery.

*For the record, it's pronounced "high lye".  Yes, really. **For a full history on the "merry game", we at Cigar City highly recommend ESPN's 30 for 30 short "What The Hell Happened To Jai Alai?", directed by Ryan Suffern.  You can watch it for free at http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=whathappenedjaialai 

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Hop Selection 2016 - Part One

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Where's Wayne Update: Brewmaster Wayne & El Lector Neil are having a blast on the road! They spent the day brewing with Wild Heaven Craft Beers and will be heading to Trappeze Pub tonight for special #CCB tap takeover [including White Oak Jai Alai]. They will be closing out their trip tomorrow night at the Brick Store Pub with another tap takeover event.

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Cigar City Invasion Orange Chicken

3 lbs. high-quality skinless chicken thighs 1 12 oz. can of Invasion Pale Ale 1 12 oz. can of frozen orange juice concentrate 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1/2 teaspoon thyme

Place Invasion, orange juice concentrate and garlic in a medium sized pot and bring to a low simmer

Place chicken thighs in pot and sprinkle thyme and black pepper on chicken

Cover and cook for 4-5 hours, or until chicken has cooked through

Serve with quinoa or brown rice, greens or legumes and a slice of orange as a garnish

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Cigar City Festbier Brat

Ingredients: 10 high-quality bratwursts 4 12 oz. cans of Cigar City's Oktoberfest 2 medium sized onions 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 1/4 cup butter

Preheat an outdoor grill for medium-high heat.

Slice onions into large sections and set aside.

Place brats into a medium-sized pot.

Add equal parts Festbier and cold water into the pot until your brats are completely submerged.

Bring your mixture to a boil; then add onions, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce and butter.

Once boil resumes, reduce temperature to a simmer. Let simmer for 15-20 minutes

Remove brats from mixture and brown each side on pre-heated grill.

Serve on a fresh bun and garnish with stone-ground mustard, sauerkraut, onions, peppers and/or a pickle spear.

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Plan on Visiting Our Tasting Room for the First Time? Here are 5 Tips To Help Make the Most of Your Visit 1) Go to the back bar first and start with a flight With so many options on draft, the thought of choosing a single pint or snifter can be overwhelming! Instead of putting all your eggs into one basket, enjoy a varied selection of our current offerings [some of which are only available in the Tasting Room].

2) Don’t be afraid to come hungry While we don’t have a kitchen on site, we do have food trucks parked outside daily! If you are interested in a snack we have a vending machine on site and a selection of local craft popcorn from BrownBag Popcorn Co. Craving something different? Don’t be afraid to carry-in or order-in from your favorite local restaurant.

3) Pack your ID Due to strict Florida ID laws we are only allow to accept certain forms of ID in our Tasting Room, so please come prepared with:

State ID cards

US State Drivers License [due to state law, we cannot accept international drivers licenses]

Passport/Passport Card [must be physically present]

Military ID [no dependent IDs]

4) We are family-friendly [including fido] Children are welcome within our Tasting Room but we strongly recommend bringing something along to keep them entertained. Our Tasting Room does not feature any bar games/activities. Leashed, friendly and well-behaved dogs are also completely welcome.

5) Beer makes the perfect souvenir Our Tasting Room features the freshest CCB beers you will ever find; so why not take it home and share it with your friends... or hoard it for yourself, we won’t judge.

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Where’s Wayne Wrecap

Our Brewmaster, Wayne Wambles, travels the globe brewing great beer with cutting-edge breweries. The Where’s Wayne Wrecap is your place to learn more about his latest adventures.

Recent travel for Wayne included a trip to Ireland to brew with Galway Bay Brewing (their brewmaster is the former head brewer at Georgia's Burnt Hickory Brewing) and a stop in Reykjavik, Iceland for a collab with his friend Stulli from Borg Brewing, one of the country's few craft brewers.

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"As much attention as our hoppy beers get, this malt-forward lager is one of my favorite seasonal releases of the year.  It's a style that has become golden-colored and slightly sweet but we opted for a more traditional and more complex approach to our Oktoberfest, taking cues from our favorites like Ayinger Oktoberfest-Marzen and Great Lakes' Oktoberfest.  Munich malt is always at the heart of the style for any brewer but at Cigar City we've complimented it's bready quality with Vienna malt and Pilsner malt for light toffee notes and a drier finish. It's complex maltiness, light herbal bitterness from the use of German-grown Hallertauer Mittlefruh hops and it's dry, clean finish all combine to an intensely satisfying but infinitely drinkable lager.  It's got more complexity than usually found in the style, but is as satisfying as the world's finest Marzen beers.  I can put on my lederhosen and drink this beer all day, though the lederhosen don't breathe as much as I'd like in the Florida sun."

-Neil Callaghan, Cigar City Brewing's El Lector

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Celebrate the Changing of Seasons With Our Oktoberfest: German-Style Fest Bier

In Florida the changing of seasons is decidedly more subtle than in most other places.  Palm fronds rarely turn brilliant red and orange the way leaves do in the rest of the country, and for Floridians sweaters exist only as rumor.  We at Cigar City rely heavily on our seasonal beers to mark the passing of each month and few beers are better at heralding the arrival of autumn than our Oktoberfest Lager.

The Oktoberfest style of lager finds it's origin in Munich, Bavaria where a celebration around the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen took place in 1810.  Enough beer and sausage was consumed to warrant the event becoming an annual festival and Munich's brewers seized it as an opportunity to showcase their brewing prowess.  The festival was (and continues to be) a locals-only affair when it comes to the beer that's served; only the six large brewers that brew within the Munich city limits may serve at the festival, those being Augustinerbrau, Hacker-Pschorr, Hoffbrau, Lowenbrau, Paulaner and Spaten-Franziskaner-brau.   Enjoying Oktoberfest beer today, you'd be surprised to hear that the prevailing beer style served for the first fifty or so years of Oktoberfest celebrations was likely a Munich-style Dunkel lager, a beer much darker and fuller-bodied than the Fesbiers we know and love.  An apocryphal story of the shift from dark Munich-style Dunkel beers to a more amber colored lager points to Joseph Sedlmayr, owner of Spaten-Leistbrau, substituting a red-hued Vienna-style lager at his tent after running completely out of the darker beer in 1872.  Over time, the festival's prevailing beer style of amber-gold lager became it's own category, alternatively called Märzen, so called because it was traditionally brewed in March (März in German) and lagered over the summer, or Oktoberfest, so called because it was served at Oktoberfest (Oktoberfest in German).  In the 1990's, the Oktoberfest beers from the six Munich brewers moved even further up the color spectrum, favoring a light golden hue that's found in today's Munich Oktoberfest beers.

While Munich's official Märzen brewers have moved toward a style of beer lighter in color and lower in body, our Festbier nods firmly toward the style's history with it's amber color, bready malt complexity and restrained hop flavor and bitterness.  At the heart of this beer is a malt bill of six different German malt varieties, including a generous helping of Munich malt.  Vienna malt and pils malt make up the majority of rest of the grist, adding notes of subtle caramel and a hint of toffee.  After adding Hallertauer Mittlefruh hops selected for their herbaceous aromas of grass and dried flowers,  we ferment the beer with an authentic Bavarian lager yeast, resulting in a clean, dry and complex lager that's at once intriguing and drinkable.

As the temperature drops to the frosty mid-80's and the snowbirds return to their cool-weather roosts, we can't think of a better beer than Cigar City Oktoberfest to compliment the onset of autumn.  Pour yourself a liter stein and let out a hearty prost!