WELCOME TO THE SUNSHINE STATE!

If there’s one thing we Floridians are known for, it’s doing things right. From well-managed elections to the careful and competent handling of high-profile criminal cases, we know what we’re doing down here! OK, maybe not so much… but there’s something Florida is doing right and that’s making exceptional craft beer, and the craft beer community in Central Florida is all the better for it.

My love affair with craft beer is not a particularly long one. Growing up in Northern California, wine was my drink of choice and what beer I was exposed to was the MPS (mass produced swill) that most people associated with “good beer.” After all, Bud Lite is the top selling beer in the U.S., so it has to be good, right? Wrong.
Luckily 3 years ago, I fell in with group of friends that are made up of craft beer bar owners, brewers and/or nerds/geeks/snobs and my craft beer education began. I was able to use the palette that I had developed over years of drinking wine and flipped the switch on it. Now I brew both at home and in a commercial space and spend just about every spare moment doing something craft beer related.

I have long contended that the major reason for the craft beer boom in Central Florida is our limited access to it. Being a peninsula, it does not always make fiscal sense for smaller breweries to ship to Florida. Some of the larger craft breweries take a chance on us, but for the most part, the invisible line that separates Florida from Georgia also separates us from a lot of great beer. To combat that, I’ve had to make 6+ hour road trips to cross the state line to restock, bring extra suitcases and packing materials when we travel and spend money on shipping/bribes to get our out-of-state friends to send us good beer! So out of shear desperation, Florida adopted a “Fine…..We’ll make our own!” approach.

Now, we boast over 40 craft beer breweries, nearly 30 brewpubs and countless craft beer bars; all ranging from the just getting started to the highly respected and well established. More than 75,000 barrels (that’s 2,325,000 gallons) of beer was produced in Florida in 2011. The numbers are still being crunched for 2012, but we do know that craft beer made up 5.6% of total beer sales in the Sunshine State – a huge jump from 2011. There are also more craft beer festivals than I can afford, but hey, that’s what credit cards are for.

My goal is to introduce the rest of the country to the people and places that make the craft beer scene in Central Florida so amazing. Their successes and struggles, sheer genius and sometimes dumb luck that put us on the map are stories that beg to be told.

When our craft beer community’s “screw you then, we’ll make our own” attitude was coupled with some serious talent, something amazing started brewing. The result has become Florida developing some world-class beer, growing an amazing community of craft beer lovers and a sense of pride in SOMETHING that we got right!