Tomcat
Pilsner
ABV: 5.4% | Hops: Saaz
Tomcat is crisp, flavorful, and refreshing! Lightly golden in color, with a persistent creamy white head. This lager showcases a prominent but pleasant bitterness that is balanced by a rich bready malt flavor, before finishing dry with a subtle spice from the traditional Saaz hops.
 
More about Tomcat
The first beer of the series features the museum’s Grumman F-14B Tomcat, a supersonic, variable-sweep wing fighter aircraft made famous by the 1986 film Top Gun. Introduced in 1974, the F-14 served as the Navy’s primary maritime air superiority and fleet defense fighter for the next three decades until the platform was retired in 2006.
NEAM’s F-14, Bureau Number 162926, was the 574th F-14 manufactured by Grumman and was delivered to the Navy in 1988. It served with fighter squadrons VF-142 and VF-143 (call sign “Taproom”) and made deployments on the carriers Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69), George Washington (CVN-73), and John F. Kennedy (CV-67), accumulating more than 4600 flight hours. It left Naval Air Station Oceana in March of 2005 and was flown to Bradley International Airport, where it was decommissioned and donated to the museum soon after.