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.

To commemorate the launch of the Tomcat Pilsner, as well as the upcoming release of the Top Gun sequel, NEAM is bringing the F-14 out of storage! It will be back on display in the museum’s Military Aviation Hangar this fall.