Brewer Q & A (Issue 22)

93 Rating – Boulevard Brewing Co. & Cigar City Brewing – Collaboration No. 5

Responses from Boulevard brewer Jeremy Danner.

Who came up with this beer's recipe?
Boulevard Brewmaster Steven Pauwels and the Boulevard brewing and quality team worked with Cigar City Brewmaster Wayne Wambles and his crew to create the recipe for Collaboration No. 5 – Tropical Pale Ale.

What’s your favorite aspect of this beer (flavor, aroma, etc.)? 
We’ve brewed a few beers that incorporated fruit, but none have necessarily been hop forward. It was fascinating to explore the way grapefruit and passionfruit interacted with hoppy flavors and aromas. We wanted to showcase the fruit, while keeping the hops very much at the fore. It was also interesting to see how the bitterness played with the fruit character. The beer needed to be just bitter enough to balance the malt sweetness and fruit character without seeming overbitter in contrast to the passionfruit.

Where does this beer’s name come from? 
We had a group email exchange where we went back and forth on how to identify the “style.” At Boulevard, we don’t necessarily brew to style. We think about the flavor of the final beer when crafting the recipe and wait until we’ve tasted the finished beer to determine how we’d like to communicate our intentions to beer drinkers. We ultimately went with Tropical Pale Ale because while we felt the beer had a high enough ABV to fall into the IPA category, but the bitterness was closer to a pale ale.

Is this your "desert island beer?"
You know, it’s up there. My desert island beer is (and always will be) Saison-Brett because of how complex yet drinkable it is, but I drank quite a bit of Tropical Pale Ale when it was around. The way the fruit flavor and aroma interacted with the hops made it super interesting for me. I feel like a desert island beer needs to be very drinkable and refreshing, but interesting.

Can you describe this beer in 10 words or less?
Crisp, refreshing interplay of tropical fruit and bright, citrusy hops

Do you know a story – or have a personal story – that revolves around this beer?
During a new market rollout in Florida, Cigar City Brewing was kind enough to open their tasting room to us to host a Boulevard tap takeover to celebrate our entrance into the state. Not only did they put our beers on tap in their brewery, but they went above and beyond by showing Game 7 of the World Series on their tasting room televisions which had never displayed anything but their beer list and a live video feed of their brewhouse and fermentation cellars. We were so taken by the hospitality and kindness displayed and the amazing quality of their beers, that we just knew we wanted to brew our next collaboration beer with them. Over plates of BBQ, a few rounds of beers and a couple of conference calls, it was decided that Boulevard Brewing Company and Cigar City Brewing would team up to brew Collaboration No. 5.