Cigar City Brewing Announces Either, Or, Neither and Nor

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Cigar City Brewing announced last night that they’re working on a few collaboration beers called Either, Or, Neither and Nor. Details from their blog below.

About the Beer

We went back and forth over a month or more trying to come up with a name for the beers we were planning to brew. In fact the recipes for the beers were done long before the beers were named. The beers are basically black IPA’s brewed with lots of citra, mt. rainier and simcoe along with Thai Thai honey from North Florida aged on medium toast Spanish Cedar. There are different hop additions in the Hill Farmstead/Grassroots version and the 2-row base malt in the CCB version is replaced with Pilsner malt in the Vermont/Denmark version. There are also some process differences which is one of the purposes of a collaboration; allowing breweries to learn from each other.

Anyway, we’d finally settled on a name for each beer which involved the physicists Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac when Shaun related a story and suggested what we all finally agreed was the perfect name for the beers. Remember the goal was to make two beers that were alike, but slightly different due to preferences in regional approach and access to ingredients. Furthermore the two beers are being packaged together in a split case with 50% of each beer per case. So beer buyers will be able receive both of these alike, but subtly different beers at the same time. So the final name selection just worked. The four beers in this collaborative series will be named:

Either, Or, Neither and Nor. Either and Or will release first and the other two will follow. Both Either and Or were brewed at CCB, but Neither and Nor will be brewed as single batches in both Vermont and Denmark. Wayne and I will likely make the trip to Denmark and the current plan is to send our brewer Tim Ogden to assist Shaun with the Vermont brew, which I plan to be present for as well.

Getting back to the brew day. The first day of brewing on Thursday went well and Tim and Wayne ended with a great yield and all the numbers where they wanted them. The out of towners lunched on Cuban Sandwiches from The Columbia in Ybor and all in all things went as well as we could have hoped.

The following day, bright and early and after they managed to outsmart my house alarm, Shaun and Ryan got started on the Denmark/Vermont half of the collaboration. For us it was a learning experience because these guys know a trick or two and introduced us to their way of doing things all while getting some experience with how we approach brewing with the ingredients and equipment we have at our disposal. Like I said, I think the exchange of ideas and brewing philosophy is extremely valuable and everyone at the brewery was thrilled to be able to interact with and learn from the experience.