The initial run of Cigar City’s reserve society, El Catador Club, has come to an end.  It lasted about 7 months, with one bottle each of 5 barrel-aged beers included in the $120 membership price, plus opportunities to buy additional bottles of those and a few other beers, first dibs on buying tickets for Hunahpu Day, and a t-shirt.  There were also some other goodies I didn’t make much use of, such as member-only growler fills at the taproom, discounts on purchases at the taproom, etc.

We wound up buying a total of 12 bottles of 7 different beers:

• Forgotten Island – a 15% monster quad, with a ton of rummy sweetness melding well with the standard quad profile of raisins and plums.
• 110K+OT Batch #6 – a good mix of raspberry tartness and roasty dry coffee
• Illuminating the Path – like an IPA that’s been aged until it became a sour porter — just a hint of sourness.  Very divisive in the reviews I’ve seen.  I really liked this, but there are a lot of people who hate it too.
• Don Gavino’s Big Guava – nice and fruity, not overwhelmingly sour, but a good tartness to it.
• Good Gourd Almighty – I don’t like regular Good Gourd much, and I’m not a big fan of pumpkin beers in general (I find they usually taste more like a spice rack than pumpkin).  But this was really nice — a lot of the overly sweet, vanilla flavor is softened and it wound up being a pretty nice fall beer.
• Amplitude – very tasty, very boozy and sweet.  The sales were put on hold at first when Lactobacillus was found by their QA process.  But the bottles were saved by pasteurization.
• Double Barrel Hunahpu – black and boozy, little bit of chile heat and rich chocolate.  Even more intense than Hunahpu, though the sweetness is moderated a little too.

Overall, we are very happy with the first round of El Catador Club, and will probably sign up for the next round.  The biggest benefit was being able to buy beer online and pick it up when it was convenient for us.  This is a huge improvement over the usual system of having only a few days notice and having to stand in line.  And in many cases, having the special beer run out before we got any (this happened more than once in the last couple of years).

The price wound up being about $20 per bottle, which seems very reasonable for high-gravity, small batch, barrel-aged beers.  And they have already announced that the second round will have its own website to automate buying and picking up beers — this will be a big improvement over the current system of buying on a third-party website and signing off on the beers being picked up in a huge binder in the tasting room.

The one addition we’d like to see in the second round is inclusion of some of Cigar City’s harder-to-find seasonal beers.  They may be easier to find in Tampa, but Cucumber, Big Sound, and especially Marshall Zhukov are very hard to find in Gainesville.  We called every bottle shop in town within a few hours of hearing about Marshall Zhukov being released, and nobody had any left.  Even with some of their more common beers, like their new Hopped on the High Seas IPA series, we weren’t able to find any of the first few batches in Gainesville (one shop told me their distributor laughed at them when they asked if they would be getting any).  So we would love the chance to buy a few bottles of those online and pick them up at the tasting room.