Hundreds of Floridian and out-of-state homebrewers are battling it out for a one-time beer-making gig with Cigar City Brewing through the Tampa craft brewery’s first homebrew kit, Pilot This! The $50 limited-supply kits, which went on sale July 1 at Vetterbrew.com , have enticed beer makers throughout 12 states, including California, Illinois and Washington. Almost half of the 300 kits are gone.
Michael Vetter, whose Clearwater business VetterBrew HomeBrew Supply Store collaborated with Cigar City brewmaster Wayne Wambles to create the one-of-a-kind kits, says the original idea was to shape a kit around a Cigar City recipe, but that all changed.
“We wanted to come up with a whole new beer,” Vetter says.
Since many professional brewers started out as at-home enthusiasts (look no further than CL’s Meet the Brewers series ), the duo’s new plan — develop a hop-centric kit and brewing competition — made sense.
“I wanted it to be engaging and a challenge for homebrewers, but also a reward for the ones who excelled the most,” Wambles says.
Loaded with unusual ingredients, as Vetter puts it, the kit incorporates seven types of hops (some of them, like the Lemondrop, weren’t given names until this year), nearly 15 pounds of various grains, 3 milliliters of CO2 hop extract (a bittering agent) and three yeast strains Cigar City’s never dabbled in. Entrants need to integrate the hop extract into their recipes as instructed, as well as one of the yeast strains, but adding the rest of the kit’s components is optional. The only outside ingredients permitted are fining agents such as water salts.
The kits will be shipped out and available for pickup at Vetter’s homebrew shop at 2705 Cypress Drive during the week of Aug. 3, allotting brewers eight weeks to produce and submit their suds to VetterBrew by 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2. Three 12-ounce bottles, which have their own lineup of dos and don’ts , are required per entry alongside documentation of each contestant’s process.
Later, the most impressive homegrown beer, as determined by Wambles and Co., will be brewed and featured on tap at Cigar City. While the victor, notified in mid-October, may also assist with the brewing process and attend their creation’s taproom unveiling, travel and lodging expenses won’t be provided.
Wambles says he could see the kit and competition becoming an annual tradition if all goes well. However, he hopes other Bay area breweries will get involved, elevating the contest into an event that’s held at least three times a year.
“It would benefit everybody, really,” he says. “I’m hoping it grows outside of [Cigar City].”
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2015.