You’ve surely passed countless orange and green cans of Jai Alai in Publix fridges or maybe ordered one at a brewery out on the West Coast for a taste of the Gulf Coast. Cigar City Brewing’s Jai Alai IPA —- otherwise known as “the best beer you probably can’t pronounce” — with notes of orange peel, clementine, and light caramel is arguably Florida’s most famous beer. But we wanted to dig into its backstory + its lasting popularity on the craft beer scene.
First off, how do you pronounce it?
HY-Ly
The backstory
Cigar City Brewing’s former owner Joseph Redner named the brew after the centuries-old sport Jai Alai.
“I had attended games as a young man at the old Jai Alai fronton in Tampa off of Gandy Boulevard,” he wrote in an email. “I always thought of IPA as a very intense style of beer and thought the game which is also pretty intense and the name matched the IPA style.”
Redner also liked that the name “kind of subtly hinted at our Florida roots as Jai Alai was a well known sport in Florida in the 1980s.”
Wait, it’s a sport?
It might not be well known today, but Jai Alai was a hit for centuries. Born in the Basque region of Spain, the handball-esque game is played on a three-walled court. Players strap “long, narrow, curved baskets to their wrists, which they use like racquets to send the ball sailing at speeds 150+ miles per hour, according to the New York Times. The point of the game? Keep the ball moving.
The sport first arrived in Miami in the 1920s and traveled up the state. The Tampa fronton (the arena where jai alai was played) opened in 1952, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The 4,000-seat Fronton hosted games five nights a week.
It was so big that, “Jai alai in Tampa was like eating black beans and rice in Tampa,” Tampa resident Nancy Kurtzman told the Times in 2018. “It was just part of our culture. It’s who this city was.”
The sport is still around, but the closest fronton is in Dania, Fox 13 reported. But groups like Sunshine City Jai Alai are ensuring it stays kickin’ — or should we say thwacking and packing heat.
The sales
The locally-grown IPA is now a national brand, sold in 49 out of 50 states, according to Jack Farris, the brand director of Jai Alai/Cigar City Brewing. But we’ll let the sales data talk.
Farris writes Jai Alai is “the largest craft brand in the state of Florida as measured by Nielsen syndicated retailer sales data.” Adding, “this year we have already sold over a million case equivalents of Jai Alai IPA and are on pace to sell about 1.5 million by the end of 2025.”
