The names Dunedin Brewery, Cigar City, Coppertail, 3 Daughters and Green Bench are certainly familiar to anyone in the Bay area who enjoys local craft beers. Lesser known but equally important are Florida Brewing Company and Southern Brewing. While the breweries of the late 1990s and early 2000s don’t have a direct connection with those from 60 to 100 years earlier, those original companies paved the way for what came after.
Florida Brewing Company, originally called the Ybor City Brewing Company, was Florida’s first brewery when it opened on February 15, 1897. Financed by local businessmen, including Vicente Martinez Ybor and Ybor’s business partner Eduardo Manrara, the brewery building was designed after the Castle Brewery in South Africa. The brewery produced lager, ice and bottled water. Though it had the capacity for 50,000 barrels per year, it initially only produced about 30,000, far less than major northern breweries, which could make ten times as much.
Despite its smaller capacity, the brewery was a major success. At one point, it supplied approximately 80% of the beer consumed in Tampa and nearly all the beer in Cuba. It remained profitable and continued to produce high-quality lager until the advent of national Prohibition in 1920.
Following the passage of the 21st Amendment and the end of Prohibition in 1932, two breweries debuted in Tampa. The Tampa Florida Brewery opened in the old Florida Brewing Company building and began distributing the soon-to-be-famous La Tropical Beer, which was produced in three styles: lager, bock and ale. Its chief competition came from the Southern Brewing Company and its SB and Silver Bar brands, which were offered in the same three styles as La Tropical (including Silver Bar Ale) plus a Wurtzburger style that was described as dark beer.
The two breweries quenched Tampa’s thirst, and that of the island of Cuba, for nearly 30 years before competition with the bigger, national breweries proved too much – notably Anheuser-Busch, which opened a branch brewery just to the north of Tampa’s city limits in the 1950s. Its $20 million operation could turn out 1,000 cans of beer per minute with only one person operating the machinery, compared to La Tropical which needed three employees to produce 250 cans per minute. Creating more competition, the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company opened a large brewery near the Anheuser-Busch operation in 1959 (which in 1999 was purchased by D. G Yuengling & Sons Brewery, the largest craft brewery in the state).
The big boys of brewing were the only ones in operation in the Tampa Bay area until a small craft brewery opened in a renovated cigar factory in Ybor City. Aptly named the Ybor City Brewing Company, it opened in 1994 and marketed several different styles, including Calusa Wheat, Gaspar’s Porter, and Ybor Brown Ale, along with the award-winning Ybor Gold lager.
The Ybor City Brewing Company didn’t last – the victim of industry forces working against them – but their legacy lives on, as they were at the beginning of what became a craft beer boom. There are now over 80 craft breweries in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties alone.
One year after Ybor City Brewing Company opened, the Doble family – who had operated a homebrew supply store called the Brew Shack – opened a brewpub, Tampa Bay Brewing Company, in Ybor City. The following year in Pinellas, Dunedin Brewery began offering craft beer to restaurants and taproom visitors. Those two companies, and the many craft breweries that followed, were spawned from the popular hobby of home brewing.
The trickle of beer that began to flow in the mid-1990s turned into a flood between 2009 and 2014. Tampa’s Cigar City Brewing, founded by Joey Redner and brewmaster Wayne Wombles, embraced excellence in brewing with a love for Tampa history, and their Jai Alai IPA almost became synonymous with the area’s craft beer scene. Across the bay, Doug Dozark (then an unpaid intern at Cigar City) began brewing beer for his family’s restaurant in Gulf Port. Soon after, Cycle Brewing was born.
A few years later, St. Petersburg added two significant breweries – 3 Daughters Brewing and Green Bench Brewing Company – and the next year welcomed Tampa’s Coppertail Brewing Co. All three are stalwarts, along with the others listed above and many others, of Tampa Bay’s craft beer community. Though change has again affected the industry, craft beer in Tampa Bay is finally here to stay.
Rodney Kite-Powell is a Tampa-born author, the official historian of Hillsborough County and the director of the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center, where he has worked since 1995.
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