Cigar City Brewing’s Joey Redner talks beer and music similarities

Joey Redner (front), owner of Cigar City Brewing, and brewmaster Wayne Wambles

Interview by Megan Cole

The landscape of craft beer was much different in 2009 when Cigar City Brewing launched. Joey Redner, founder of the Tampa-based brewery, has seen how the industry has changed, not just in Florida, but also across North America. Despite the challenges of brewing beer in a craft-beer-crazy world, Cigar City has embraced their own unique identity, which includes music-themed beers and unique flavours and quality. We caught up with Redner to talk beer, music and Gwar, after members of the Rice and Bread team recently enjoyed a brewery tour in Tampa while attending Pre-Fest.

Why did you want to start a brewery?
I was really a fan of craft beer, and how I define craft beer tends to be your non-mass-produced lagers. I was never a fan of that style. If I had been, I probably never would have looked for anything else, but as I started to get into craft beer I saw how difficult it was to consistently get it. In the process of trying to track it down, I discovered you could make it; that started for me in the early ’90s.

When did the idea of opening a brewery come up?
I sort of bee-bopped around doing a lot of different stuff and just always educating myself about beer. In the back of my mind I just assumed that someone in Tampa would eventually start a brewery. In a city the size of Tampa, the metro area is about 2.5 million people, it just blew my mind there wasn’t a brewery, and I figured it would come, but I kind of started asking the questions like, “How come no one is doing it? Is the equipment too expensive? Can you not get the materials in large enough quantities? Is there an issue with the water?” I just couldn’t figure out why no one was doing it. I was looking to answer those questions for my own personal satisfaction, but in the process I built a business and realized I could do it. The whole time I was wondering why I was the only one who had come to that conclusion, like what was wrong with my math? I kept going over and over and over it, and saw that you could do it and there was a market for it. That’s what really pushed me in that direction. I was fortunate enough that I could access capital through family and I didn’t have to go out and borrow money. That got me ahead of the game as far as the startup time.

Are you guys still one of the only craft breweries in Tampa, or has it expanded since you started?
There have actually been quite a lot since we opened up. When we opened, there was probably less than 40 breweries in the whole state, now there are about that many in the Tampa Bay area. And there are closer to 100 in the state, so it has close to doubled.

What is it like to be a craft brewery in this market these days? There are so many craft breweries, not just in Florida, but in all of North America. What do you guys to do set yourselves a part?
In many ways, it’s a lot easier than it was. The people that came early, like the guys at Sierra Nevada, the Widmer brothers, those ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s breweries, had a much tougher time with it. There were challenges just trying to get distribution and trying to get the beer into the market. For the guys that came in my time, and I was in 2009, it was easier. There are still obviously challenges. You still have to make a good product, you still have to run a business, but there isn’t that challenge of getting the beer to market. I don’t want to make it sound easy though, because it’s still very difficult. It’s just easier than it would have been because of all the groundwork that was laid by some of those earlier brewers.

What are the challenges breweries are facing now?
The challenges come with there being a lot more people coming into the craft brewery space. A lot of people worry there’s getting to be too many breweries; I don’t think that is the case at all. There are about 3,500 breweries now, with a population north of 300 million, and we had about 3,500 breweries in the late 1800s, with a population that was 100 million or so. I think it’s certainly sustainable, but it’s going to be more of a challenge to become a regional or national brewery. I think what you are going to see is lots of local breweries, and that’s fairly sustainable. There are certainly challenges, like raw ingredients could become an issue, and getting access to the hops. IPA has become the most popular style that craft breweries offer and those are hop-heavy beers, and making sure you have access to those raw ingredients could become a challenge down the road to those smaller brewers. But then again craft brewers run with the punches, but if you’re trying to build a brand you have to have that consistency, but if you’re just a small neighbourhood brewery you can change things up.

Some of the Rice and Bread team were down in Tampa recently and went on a tour of the brewery, and they said it was neat to see the love of all kinds of music that was in the brewery. How does music influence the brewery?
There are some parallels. Obviously, with the indie music scene, because in the craft-beer industry, you had people that said, “I can’t get the product I want because it isn’t being made commercially.” So, they went out and learned out to make it themselves, and they got good at that and wanted to turn it into a business. A lot of times they didn’t have the same support that a big company would have in terms of marketing, and just the equipment that it takes to get things done to get the product to market. They set that up themselves, and there are a lot of parallels with that and the indie-music scene. The record labels weren’t interested, so people said, “Fuck the industry, we’ll do it ourselves.” You see that a lot in the craft-beer industry.

Do you guys have a lot of musicians on staff?
It always amazes me. I think we have one brewer on our entire staff that doesn’t play an instrument. I don’t know what it is, but I think there are definitely some commonalities between the love of music and the desire to want to create; it gets into a person and drives them to fields where they can do that, and brewing is something you can do to create a tangible thing that brings people enjoyment. Music and beer share that; they’re tangible things that can bring people enjoyment. Well, actually, in some ways they are both fleeting and tangible. You can hear music, you know what it sounds like, but it fades if you don’t record it. And beer is the same; it’s there, you can drink it and touch it, but once you drink it, it goes away.

What kind of music do people hear when they take a tour at Cigar City?
The one thing that’s interesting when you take the tour here is you go from brewhouse one, and as you walk around you literally hear different musical genres. Our lead brewer in brewhouse one, he also plays Django Reinhardt on Fridays, we call it Django Fridays. He’s got fairly eclectic tastes. He’s actually an amazing guitarist. But you’ll go from there and then you’ll go to the tasting room, and there will be a different genre in there. Then you’ll go to packaging and you might have some black metal going; from there you’ll go to brewhouse two and the cellar, and there will be a different genre. That’s the experience people get, and it shows all our staff’s tastes and it all coexists perfectly.

So, who’s the Gwar fan at the brewery? I noticed you guys have a Gwar beer.
That actually came from a local home brewer [Rob Chalmers of Chalmers Brewing] who had become friends with the band, and he reached out to do a commercial product of it. When someone comes to you and says, “Do you want to do a Gwar beer?” most of the people in the brewery are pretty musically diverse, so we are all very aware of Gwar, and have been to Gwar shows, so we were like, “Hell yes, we want to do a Gwar beer!” This is actually the second year we’ve done the Gwar beer. We’ve done lots of musically themed beers. Our brewmaster, Wayne Wambles,was in bands for years and was really into the indie music scene, so fairly early on we did some musically themed beers, and we did some beers in conjunction with bands he had worked with in the past.

Cigar City Brewing is located at 3924 West Spruce Street in Tampa, Florida.