When Mark Tuchman moved to Florida from New York two years ago, he almost immediately came into contact with Joey Redner. Both of them had long been serious members of ratebeer.com, and the two met at a beer rating party at Redner’s house. Right then, Tuchman realized that Redner’s fledgling Cigar City Brewing was something special.
Soon enough, he was sending — admittedly illegally — Cigar City beer up to his award-winning craft beer retail store in New York for his best clients, which helped spur on a beer geek frenzy that saw the brewery expanding into that state long before Redner had planned. Soon, Tuchman sold his New York store and re-entered the craft beer industry in Sarasota with a bar called Mr. Beery’s, which quickly joined long-standing giant Cock and Bull as hubs of the growing craft brew geek scene in the area. And he featured plenty of Cigar City products from the very beginning.
When Tuchman started bidding on one of the Cigar City lots in this year's CL Holiday Auction — "Item #066: Brew your own beer at Cigar City Brewing and follow up at home" — he didn’t plan on keeping it for himself. “It coincided perfectly with our one-year anniversary and the Cigar City Total Tap Takeover,” Tuchman explains.
On January 29, all 25 taps at Mr. Beery’s will pour strictly Cigar City products, from the well-known Jai Alai Pale Ale to some of the brewery’s more esoteric concoctions. Tuchman has hoarded kegs of seasonal and limited production beers from Cigar City since he opened the bar a year ago, the kinds of beers that few beer geeks have had an opportunity to sample unless they’re regulars at the brewery’s tasting room.
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2011.