Cigar City Introduces Tampa-Style Lager

When you work as hard as we do, nearly 24/6 to keep up with demand and make new beers (we made 950 since 2008 according to Ratebeer), you can work up a real thirst by the end of a shift.

We’ve been making a lager since 2011. It was called Hotter Than Helles. It was a Munich-style Helles recipe, unfiltered, and quickly became a Cigar City Brewing crew favorite. It also served as a fantastic “gateway beer” for new craft drinkers in our tasting room. We were certainly paying attention.

This year, we decided to evolve the Lager idea.

We wanted the branding of this classic beer style to reflect the classic Helles style that inspired it. To that end the design began to take on the look and feel of old-school dad beers — evoking memories of front porch conversations with friends, summer afternoons adrift on a boat, late nights with good people in windowless pubs, and those long tables out front of our taproom where we all gather ourselves and put a few down after a long shift. Basically, it began to look like what it is; a beer that’s made for drinkin’.

We also took this chance to tweak the recipe — like you know we do. We like tweaking. We are in fact inveterate tweakers and so we just couldn’t resist. You may remember the Lager Test we conducted in our tasting room. We did pilot batches of two lagers: one with traditional German hops (akin to the hop regimen in the former Hotter Than Helles), the other with unique experimental hops. The people spoke and we agreed: the traditionally-hopped lager won.

We dropped some grain, dried it out a bit, and now it finishes at 4.5% ABV. Hop assertive for the style. That results is some serious easy drinkin’. But of course, it’s still unfiltered. That was always going to be the call.

We’ll miss Hotter Than Helles, but we’re looking forward to Lager. Soon to be available year-round in cans and on draft.