Wayne Wambles, brewmaster for Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, Florida, set out to create a tropical and juicy IPA called “Jai Alai” way back in 2008, before it was trendy. A decade later, Jai Alai still tastes fresh and current and has proven curiously timeless relative to a number of its competitors. Whether it’s the balance of the recipe design, a methodical approach to raw materials, or brewing toward a sense of place, his approach has much to teach.
Designing an IPA to appeal to a wide range of beer drinkers is hard. Designing one that remains appealing to drinkers ten years later is damn near impossible. Today, commercial brewers regularly reformulate even flagship brands to make them more appealing to current palates, but a very small cadre of IPAs—Firestone Walker’s Union Jack and Odell Brewing’s IPA come to mind—remain as fresh and relevant today as they did when they first appeared in the 2000s. Cigar City Brewing’s Jai Alai IPA is a member of that elusive club, but Brewmaster Wayne Wambles had more humble goals when designing the beer.
“My whole concept for that beer was to make an IPA as tropical as I could possibly make it,” says Wambles. “If you take a look back when the beer was actually designed—it was piloted for the first time in 2008 and released in March of 2009—no one was making IPAs like that back then. A lot of people were making IPAs that were more citrus-forward, or citrus and piney, but they weren’t making IPAs that were more focused on mango and pineapple and orange marmalade. I was trying to emulate our tropical feel, our location and concept, through the beer.”