Tag Archives: tampabeer

Florida’s 2013 Great American Beer Festival Breweries

The Brewers’ Association has posted a list of all the confirmed participants of 2013’s Great American Beer Festival.

Florida’s brewing community will be represented by (alphabetically):

*7venth Sun Brewery of Dunedin
*Cigar City Brewing of Tampa
*Darwin’s Brewing Company of Sarasota
*Due South Brewing of Boynton Beach
*Florida Beer Company of Melbourne +
*Funky Buddha Brewery of Oakland Park
*Swamp Head Brewery of Gainesville

+ (FBC is a sponsor, and is not listed on the GABF site, according to FBC rep. Tom Barris)

Last year’s participants not going back this year include:

*Engine 15 Brewing Company of Jacksonville
*Pensacola Bay Brewing of Pensacola

Tickets for the Great American Beer Festival will go on sale today, 31 July 2013 at 10am MST, or 12pm EST. Tickets last year sold out in record time, and if the brewers’ interest is any indication (brewery slots sold out in almost two hours), they will go quickly. Tickets are $75 per session, and the festival hosts four sessions on the festival weekend of October 10th-12th, 2013.

About the Festival:

The Great American Beer Festival is the premier U.S. beer festival and competition. Each year, GABF represents the largest collection of U.S. beer ever served, in the format of a public tasting event plus a private competition. GABF brings together the brewers and beers that make the U.S. the world’s greatest brewing nation. This event showcases the diverse beers that make craft brewing one of the fastest-growing segments of the beer, wine and spirits industry. GABF was founded in 1982, and has been growing and evolving along with the American craft brewing industry ever since.

More details on Cigar City & New Belgium collaboration

Today Beerpulse.com posted the newly approved label for Cigar City and New Belgium Brewing’s collaboration beer. According to the label description:

We’re about to light up Florida with this Cigar City collaborative brew. Our Belgian yeast tangos with Anaheim and Marash peppers along with loads of citrusy hops to create an ale full of spice. Aged on Spanish cedar to salute our mutual love for wood!

Since New Belgium launched in Florida beginning Monday 29 July, the collaboration beer is definitely going to be available in the Sunshine State.

News via Beerpulse.com and image via TTBOnline.

Three Palms Brewing looks to open tasting room

Tampa- Three Palms Brewing, one of Tampa’s small-but-growing craft breweries has hopes of soon expanding their operations to include an onsite tasting room.

Brewery owner Randy Reaver posted recently:

Zoning hearing is complete, thanks for the support, you know who you are! Decision in 15 days and hopefully tasting room open shortly after!

When asked for further comment, Reaver said that the brewery went in for a zoning hearing in hopes of being able to add a tasting room to their Hobbs Street location. Three Palms has to wait 15 days for approval from the city. If they are given approval, then Three Palms will submit an application for a 2COP license, then get a temporary license and be able to serve their beer onsite as soon as possible. Reaver says he has 20 taps lined up, sitting all by themselves, warming the bench just waiting to get in the game.

Saint Somewhere Brewing Company Logo

Saint Somewhere announces two collaboration beers

Tarpon Springs- On Friday, Saint Somewhere Brewing Company announced two collaboration farmhouse ales in the works with two breweries in the farmhouse region of Belgium and France.

In October, Saint Somewhere brewer Bob Sylvester will travel as a guest of Bon Beer Voyage on a trip to Belgium and France where he will brew his collaboration beers with Brasserie Thiriez of Esquelbecq, France and Brasserie de Cazeau of Templeuve, Belgium. Most of the beer from Bob’s collaboration with the Thiriez Brewery will be imported back to the United States. In the words of Bob Sylvester: “Both [collaboration beers] will be in the Farmhouse tradition…one Belgian, one French and by two of my favorite breweries.”

Both Cazeau and Thiriez breweries make farmhouse ales available in Florida from retailers who specialize in imported ales. Cazeau brewery traces its roots back to brewing traditions begun by family members around 1753, while Cazeau brewery began brewing in 1996. Cazeau brewery is most known for “Saison de Cazeau” and Thiriez is known for “Thiriez Extra.” For more information, see the links to each brewery’s websites.

El Catador sells out online in under 30 minutes

Tampa- It took less than a half an hour after Cigar City Brewing posted “GO!” on Facebook for them to reach the 500 mark of emails from hopeful out-of-area El Catador prospects.

The brewery posted the rules for online El Catador signups at 4:26pm and had hopeful folks who wanted to join wait until 8pm EST GMT to send an email. When the brewery posted that club memberships were full the clock read 8:27pm.

El Catador statistics: It took 27 minutes to sell 500 memberships to people from outside of Tampa, and five days (Sunday until Thursday) to sell 1,000 memberships to locals via the Cigar City Tasting Room. Now 1,500 people are members of the club; since Catadors get one bottle of five different beers that means 7,500 bottles of Cigar City beer are pre-destined for club members.

No word yet on what the beers of El Catador Club will be, but the brewery is working with the twitter hashtag #elcatadorclub and the twitter handle @elcatadorclub to communicate directly with members.

Cigar City Brewing’s collaboration-palooza

Tampa- Fresh off the heels of releasing their collaboration beer with Portland, Oregon’s Widmer Brothers Brewing (called The Gentleman’s Club), Tampa’s Cigar City Brewing has announced that they are not slowing down on the collaboration beers. Two more major collaborations have been announced this week, as Cigar City works with two national breweries that helped define craft beer: Chico, California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Fort Collins, Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing Company.

Cigar City will be one of twelve breweries across the United States to collaborate with Sierra Nevada on their variety twelve-pack, to be released in the summer of 2014. The brewery then plans to tour the brewery folks to festivals across the country touring from Chico to Asheville, North Carolina, where their new Sierra Nevada brewery will open.

“We want to highlight the success of craft beer, not just our own next step,” said Ken Grossman, Sierra Nevada’s founder. “Craft brewers are a close bunch, and we’ve all helped each other get to this point. This is a fun way to showcase even just a fraction of the talent that’s out there, and somehow 12 beers doesn’t feel like enough. If this weren’t already a logistical mammoth, we’d brew with even more of our great peers.”

The specific travel path for festivals is a work in progress, but in spring 2014, these breweries will visit Chico to develop recipes and begin brewing:

Allagash Brewing Company, Portland, ME
Ballast Point Brewing Company, San Diego, CA
Bell’s Brewery, Inc., Kalamazoo, MI
Cigar City Brewing, LLC, Tampa, FL
Firestone Walker Brewing Co., Paso Robles, CA
New Glarus Brewing Company, New Glarus, WI
Ninkasi Brewing Company, Eugene, OR
Oskar Blues Brewing Company, Longmont, CO
Russian River Brewing Company, Santa Rosa, CA
Three Floyds Brewing, LLC, Munster, IN
Victory Brewing Company, Downingtown, PA
Local brewing community in Asheville, NC

Cigar City is not standing still after announcing this beer: a collaboration on a national scale. They also announced a collaboration with New Belgium Brewing Company of Fort Collins, Colorado. That beer will be a part of the New Belgium Lips of Faith Series, and will be distributed through New Belgium into Florida once it is available. The details on the beer itself: “it has a Belgian yeast, tons of citrus hops, some peppers and Spanish cedar.” More details on this beer will be posted as they emerge, but the best news is that this beer will be available at stores in Florida, no trading or travelling required.

El Catador Club Signup rolls out

Many craft beer events are quickly becoming renowned for how many people show up, how many complaints get registered, and how many people feel wronged at the end of the day because the host brewery was not prepared. All of those labels embody everything that Cigar City Brewing hoped to avoid with the signup for their new reserve society, El Catador Club.

When the brewery announced Saturday night via social media that the signup would be open to anyone who showed up today only, some were wary, but many saw the move as a class act. The comments today on Twitter following the hashtag #elcatador seemed positive and complimentary of the Cigar City Brewing crew. Several complimented how quickly the line was moving, and one user boasted that he was in and out of the signup process in twenty minutes.

While the signup process still has about twenty minutes left, and the brewery is still tallying members, and the process has been moved to inside the CCB compound as of about 10:00pm. It looks like this signup will be counted a success and the only thing members will be feeling is the gloss on their shiny membership cards.