ChrisC
Well-known member
I saw this when visiting parents this week in South Florida for Thanksgiving. It's another trend that I thought was long overdue for a correction. Who wants a heavy beer in Florida? I was asked in the mid-2010s to invest in one—the numbers were horrible.
Florida was dirt cheap until the very late 2010s, and it was easy to take over warehouse space - Wynwood (Miami), Fat Village (Ft. Lauderdale).
I thought it was a very good read on beer trends:
Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel
Johnathan Wakefield, owner of J. Wakefield Brewing, will send off his Wynwood brewery and taproom in style with an Oct. 19 event called The Last Dance. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
By Phillip Valys | pvalys@sunsentinel.com | South Florida Sun Sentinel
UPDATED: October 27, 2024 at 3:32 PM EST
It was the height of South Florida’s craft-beer renaissance when Johnathan Wakefield opened J. Wakefield Brewing in 2015.
Loyal drinkers camped out overnight for bottle releases of Dragon Fruit Passion Fruit, a tart Berliner Weisse featuring Florida fruit, and thousands queued up each year outside his “Star Wars”-themed Wynwood taproom for Wakefest, a beer bash bursting with experimentation, from stouts blended with ancho chilies and Vietnamese cinnamon to golden ales punched with Key lime juice and vanilla beans.
Johnathan Wakefield inside his “Star Wars”-themed taproom in Wynwood, J. Wakefield Brewing. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Then, after a decade-long boom came the bittersweet bust: In August, the Miami titan of beermaking told customers he will close on Sunday, Oct. 27, months shy of the brewery’s 10th birthday.
“I knew the bubble would have to burst someday,” Wakefield says.
The closing of J. Wakefield Brewing reflects a broader decline in the local craft-beer scene. After a golden beer rush flooded the region in the 2010s, the past 12 months have seen a sixth of all Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade County breweries — nine in total — shut their doors. They include:
“For me, it was a combination of the rent, the declining taproom numbers and the declining beer industry,” says Wakefield, who cohosts “The Beer Hour with Johnathan Wakefield” on SiriusXM’s Business Radio. “It’s simple math: If other costs go up and I can’t raise the price of beer, my profit margins are lower. The whole business model has changed.”
J. Wakefield Brewing is scheduled to close Sunday, Oct. 27, after nearly a decade in business. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Still Wakefield, of North Miami, refuses to leave his business behind: He’s currently scouting locations for a much-smaller J. Wakefield brewhouse and taproom in northern Miami-Dade County, which will have a kitchen so “I can make up for slower beer revenue with food sales,” he says. Meanwhile, on Saturday, Oct. 19, he plans to throw “a last hurrah get-together” in J. Wakefield’s Wynwood taproom. Dubbed The Last Dance, the daylong event will feature six guest taps and a food truck.
Brewers like Wakefield say recent closures mirror worrisome trends in the larger industry nationally and — even worse — suggest even more could be coming soon.
“I’m not quite sure we’re seeing a complete apocalypse here, but there are still a few more closures to go,” says Tim Dornblaser, a board member with the Florida Brewers Guild, a nonprofit trade group promoting craft beer in the Sunshine State.
One of these closings, Dornblaser fears, might be his own. At NOBO Brewing Co. in Boynton Beach, whose subway-tiled tasting room occupies a warehouse off Interstate 95, sales are down 30% since October 2023, he says.
Meanwhile, everything else has spiked: monthly rents, the cost of German malts — and even aluminum cans, which jumped from 19.5 cents per can in 2020 to 30 cents this year.
NOBO Brewing Company / Courtesy
A pair of pints at NOBO Brewing Co. in Boynton Beach. (NOBO Brewing Co./Courtesy
Interestingly, craft-beer tastes have also evolved, sometimes in head-scratching ways, he says. In 2017, when Dornblaser opened, customers gravitated to pastry stouts and hazy New England IPAs. Then came a triple-hopped IPA craze, a smoothie sour fad, followed by seltzers. Now the “consumer has returned to low-alcohol and budget-friendly yellow beer,” he says, such as pilsners, lagers and hefeweizens. Others want nonalcoholic brews. (He carries nine on his menu.)
“I can hang on for a few more months, but things have to get better during season,” Dornblaser says. “So I’m running with the market trends. People just aren’t drinking craft like they used to. They’re going after something else.”
Adults age 18 to 34 are also drinking less than ever, an August 2023 Gallup poll suggests. Among the reasons why: Moderate drinking is “unhealthy,” and heavier marijuana use may have replaced younger adults’ vice of choice.
Craft-beer drinker Joe Pye, of Davie, says he fits into the former category. A decade ago, back when “craft beer was synonymous with cool,” Pye hopscotched around craft-beer bars like Invasive Species in Fort Lauderdale and Tripping Animals Brewing in Doral. Now he’s 35, raising a 10-month-old, Radley, at home, and watching his health after hearing about his father’s recent cancer scare.
“My wife and I were drinking buddies and dual-income, the target consumer,” says Pye, who also operates a blog, BrowardBeer.com. “But beer isn’t as good for our health.”
Jim Rassol / Sun Sentinel
The Funky Buddha Brewery in Oakland Park recently marked its 11th anniversary in Oakland Park. (Jim Rassol/South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
When he drinks at breweries now, sparingly, he notices fewer younger people in the taprooms.
“When I went to Laser Wolf [in Fort Lauderdale] or Invasive Species, I could hang out and drink a really good beer,” he adds. “But if there isn’t a generation coming up behind me, who’s replacing my seat at the bar?”
Matt Gacioch, a staff economist for the Colorado-based Brewers Association, another trade group, said the overall beer market shrank by 5.1% in 2023.
Does that worry him? Not really, Gacioch says. Nationally, “what we’re seeing is the craft-beer market is maturing after a decade of explosive growth, but it’s not in any significant decline,” he says. “Things are just flattening out. Almost as many breweries are closing as they are opening, but there were still more breweries in 2023 than in any other year in U.S. history.”
Does that mean the rash of brewery closings in South Florida also points to a “maturing” scene? Answer: It’s not just South Florida, he adds.
“A maturing market is just a reality all over the country,” he says. “Unfortunately, a lot of small breweries put their heart and soul into making their business work but still have to board up and close.”
John McCall/South Florida Sun Sentinel
Patrons outside LauderAle Brewery, which marked its 10th anniversary in July 2024 in Fort Lauderdale. (John McCall/South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
In the 2010s, local breweries sought to peel away Bud, Corona and Coors drinkers with the tantalizing flavors of India pale ales and hefeweizens, stouts and porters, pilsners and Belgians. Over the following decade, roughly 70 South Florida breweries opened across the tricounty area, large and nano, including Funky Buddha Brewery in Oakland Park (2013), Due South Brewing Co. in Boynton Beach (2012; closed 2021), 26 Degree Brewing Co. in Pompano Beach (2015), LauderAle in Fort Lauderdale (2014) and Wynwood Brewing Company in Miami (2013).
These taprooms became destinations for drinkers who wanted to try small pours of complex beers. And for a while, that rivalry with Anheuser-Busch InBev united local brewers, says Adam Fine, a Florida Brewers Guild member and the “director of hoperations” at Tarpon River Brewing in Fort Lauderdale.
“We basically lived by the mantra that a rising tide lifts all boats,” Fine says. “There’s all this terrible beer out there and we’re going to keep cracking away and take away their market share with craft beer. So we weren’t in competition with each other.”
After the pandemic, that mindset changed, Fine explains.
“The marketplace is ultra-competitive now with liquor, hard seltzers and [nonalcoholic] beers taking away from craft-beer sales,” he says. “And Gen-Z drinkers aren’t keeping up with craft beer or drinking as much. Which means our breweries are competing with each other for what’s left.”
One of Fran Andrewlevich’s breweries recently lost that fight. On Sept. 20, he kicked his final keg at Steam Horse Brewing Co., a railroad-themed brewhouse that shuttered after six years in West Palm Beach.
Jennifer Lett / Sun Sentinel
Steam Horse Brewing Co., an industrial-chic, locomotive-themed craft brewery owned by Fran Andrewlevich, has permanently closed in West Palm Beach. (Jennifer Lett/South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
When he first opened, in 2018, his warehouse taproom overlooked knee-high grass and empty lots, but Andrewlevich smelled urban renewal. Yet the pandemic — plus road construction on Elizabeth Avenue last year — stunted growth in the nascent nightlife village, forcing him to rely on foot traffic from nearby food hall Grandview Public Market.
Responding to shrinking demands, Andrewlevich says he brewed “30, 40% less beer over the past 12 months.”
“We brewed less because they were drinking less,” he says. “The neighborhood never really formed, the regular drinker is watching their wallet, and every pizza parlor around has nice craft beers, so why bother visiting a taproom? Every piece of it took a chunk away from us.”
Andrewlevich’s sister Palm Beach County breweries to the north, Tequesta Brewing Co. and Twisted Trunk Brewing Co., will remain open and continue serving Steam Horse’s flagship brew, Steam Horse Lager. Both remaining taprooms are getting a makeover to handle South Florida’s new craft-beer landscape.
“We’re putting pizza ovens in both taprooms,” he says. “We have to evolve.”
Will craft beer ever be dominant again?
“We had 15 years of double-digit growth, but craft beer isn’t the newest, coolest, hippest thing anymore,” Andrewlevich says. “But everything is cyclical. It will come back.”
Florida was dirt cheap until the very late 2010s, and it was easy to take over warehouse space - Wynwood (Miami), Fat Village (Ft. Lauderdale).
I thought it was a very good read on beer trends:
Craft-beer armageddon? Nine South Florida breweries have shut down in one year. After a decade of buzzy suds from local breweries, the golden age of craft-beer dominance may be over. Will it ever bounce back?
Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel
Johnathan Wakefield, owner of J. Wakefield Brewing, will send off his Wynwood brewery and taproom in style with an Oct. 19 event called The Last Dance. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
By Phillip Valys | pvalys@sunsentinel.com | South Florida Sun Sentinel
UPDATED: October 27, 2024 at 3:32 PM EST
It was the height of South Florida’s craft-beer renaissance when Johnathan Wakefield opened J. Wakefield Brewing in 2015.
Loyal drinkers camped out overnight for bottle releases of Dragon Fruit Passion Fruit, a tart Berliner Weisse featuring Florida fruit, and thousands queued up each year outside his “Star Wars”-themed Wynwood taproom for Wakefest, a beer bash bursting with experimentation, from stouts blended with ancho chilies and Vietnamese cinnamon to golden ales punched with Key lime juice and vanilla beans.
Then, after a decade-long boom came the bittersweet bust: In August, the Miami titan of beermaking told customers he will close on Sunday, Oct. 27, months shy of the brewery’s 10th birthday.
“I knew the bubble would have to burst someday,” Wakefield says.
The closing of J. Wakefield Brewing reflects a broader decline in the local craft-beer scene. After a golden beer rush flooded the region in the 2010s, the past 12 months have seen a sixth of all Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade County breweries — nine in total — shut their doors. They include:
- J. Wakefield Brewing, Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood (closing Oct. 27)
- Steam Horse Brewing Co., West Palm Beach (closed Sept. 20)
- Unbranded Brewing Co., Hialeah (closed in August)
- Ookapow Brewing Co., West Palm Beach (August)
- Dream State Brewing, inside Fort Lauderdale’s Sistrunk Marketplace and Brewery (August)
- Odd Breed Wild Ales in Pompano Beach (July)
- Prison Pals Brewing Co. in Oakland Park (June)
- Wynwood Brewing Co., Miami (closed taproom in February and merged with nearby Veza Sur Brewing Co.)
- Skunkworts Brewing Concern, West Palm Beach (November 2023; an Instagram post claims the brewery is moving and plans “to open early 2025”)
“For me, it was a combination of the rent, the declining taproom numbers and the declining beer industry,” says Wakefield, who cohosts “The Beer Hour with Johnathan Wakefield” on SiriusXM’s Business Radio. “It’s simple math: If other costs go up and I can’t raise the price of beer, my profit margins are lower. The whole business model has changed.”
Still Wakefield, of North Miami, refuses to leave his business behind: He’s currently scouting locations for a much-smaller J. Wakefield brewhouse and taproom in northern Miami-Dade County, which will have a kitchen so “I can make up for slower beer revenue with food sales,” he says. Meanwhile, on Saturday, Oct. 19, he plans to throw “a last hurrah get-together” in J. Wakefield’s Wynwood taproom. Dubbed The Last Dance, the daylong event will feature six guest taps and a food truck.
Brewers like Wakefield say recent closures mirror worrisome trends in the larger industry nationally and — even worse — suggest even more could be coming soon.
“I’m not quite sure we’re seeing a complete apocalypse here, but there are still a few more closures to go,” says Tim Dornblaser, a board member with the Florida Brewers Guild, a nonprofit trade group promoting craft beer in the Sunshine State.
One of these closings, Dornblaser fears, might be his own. At NOBO Brewing Co. in Boynton Beach, whose subway-tiled tasting room occupies a warehouse off Interstate 95, sales are down 30% since October 2023, he says.
Meanwhile, everything else has spiked: monthly rents, the cost of German malts — and even aluminum cans, which jumped from 19.5 cents per can in 2020 to 30 cents this year.
NOBO Brewing Company / Courtesy
A pair of pints at NOBO Brewing Co. in Boynton Beach. (NOBO Brewing Co./Courtesy
Interestingly, craft-beer tastes have also evolved, sometimes in head-scratching ways, he says. In 2017, when Dornblaser opened, customers gravitated to pastry stouts and hazy New England IPAs. Then came a triple-hopped IPA craze, a smoothie sour fad, followed by seltzers. Now the “consumer has returned to low-alcohol and budget-friendly yellow beer,” he says, such as pilsners, lagers and hefeweizens. Others want nonalcoholic brews. (He carries nine on his menu.)
“I can hang on for a few more months, but things have to get better during season,” Dornblaser says. “So I’m running with the market trends. People just aren’t drinking craft like they used to. They’re going after something else.”
A craft-beer buzzkill?
And that “something else” is ready-to-drink cocktails, seltzers and nonalcoholic beers, according to NielsenIQ, a marketing research firm. A September survey said alcohol-free beverage sales have exploded in the past year and are expected to surpass $1 billion in 2025. In another report from last November, NIQ said craft-beer sales fell flat in 2022 before declining 5.3% in stores and 6.7% in bars and restaurants nationwide in 2023.Adults age 18 to 34 are also drinking less than ever, an August 2023 Gallup poll suggests. Among the reasons why: Moderate drinking is “unhealthy,” and heavier marijuana use may have replaced younger adults’ vice of choice.
Craft-beer drinker Joe Pye, of Davie, says he fits into the former category. A decade ago, back when “craft beer was synonymous with cool,” Pye hopscotched around craft-beer bars like Invasive Species in Fort Lauderdale and Tripping Animals Brewing in Doral. Now he’s 35, raising a 10-month-old, Radley, at home, and watching his health after hearing about his father’s recent cancer scare.
“My wife and I were drinking buddies and dual-income, the target consumer,” says Pye, who also operates a blog, BrowardBeer.com. “But beer isn’t as good for our health.”
Jim Rassol / Sun Sentinel
The Funky Buddha Brewery in Oakland Park recently marked its 11th anniversary in Oakland Park. (Jim Rassol/South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
When he drinks at breweries now, sparingly, he notices fewer younger people in the taprooms.
“When I went to Laser Wolf [in Fort Lauderdale] or Invasive Species, I could hang out and drink a really good beer,” he adds. “But if there isn’t a generation coming up behind me, who’s replacing my seat at the bar?”
Matt Gacioch, a staff economist for the Colorado-based Brewers Association, another trade group, said the overall beer market shrank by 5.1% in 2023.
Does that worry him? Not really, Gacioch says. Nationally, “what we’re seeing is the craft-beer market is maturing after a decade of explosive growth, but it’s not in any significant decline,” he says. “Things are just flattening out. Almost as many breweries are closing as they are opening, but there were still more breweries in 2023 than in any other year in U.S. history.”
Does that mean the rash of brewery closings in South Florida also points to a “maturing” scene? Answer: It’s not just South Florida, he adds.
“A maturing market is just a reality all over the country,” he says. “Unfortunately, a lot of small breweries put their heart and soul into making their business work but still have to board up and close.”
John McCall/South Florida Sun Sentinel
Patrons outside LauderAle Brewery, which marked its 10th anniversary in July 2024 in Fort Lauderdale. (John McCall/South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
South Florida’s cup runneth over
Just what caused South Florida’s craft-beer surge a decade ago? Answer: A drive for wild experimentation and a common rival.In the 2010s, local breweries sought to peel away Bud, Corona and Coors drinkers with the tantalizing flavors of India pale ales and hefeweizens, stouts and porters, pilsners and Belgians. Over the following decade, roughly 70 South Florida breweries opened across the tricounty area, large and nano, including Funky Buddha Brewery in Oakland Park (2013), Due South Brewing Co. in Boynton Beach (2012; closed 2021), 26 Degree Brewing Co. in Pompano Beach (2015), LauderAle in Fort Lauderdale (2014) and Wynwood Brewing Company in Miami (2013).
These taprooms became destinations for drinkers who wanted to try small pours of complex beers. And for a while, that rivalry with Anheuser-Busch InBev united local brewers, says Adam Fine, a Florida Brewers Guild member and the “director of hoperations” at Tarpon River Brewing in Fort Lauderdale.
“We basically lived by the mantra that a rising tide lifts all boats,” Fine says. “There’s all this terrible beer out there and we’re going to keep cracking away and take away their market share with craft beer. So we weren’t in competition with each other.”
After the pandemic, that mindset changed, Fine explains.
“The marketplace is ultra-competitive now with liquor, hard seltzers and [nonalcoholic] beers taking away from craft-beer sales,” he says. “And Gen-Z drinkers aren’t keeping up with craft beer or drinking as much. Which means our breweries are competing with each other for what’s left.”
One of Fran Andrewlevich’s breweries recently lost that fight. On Sept. 20, he kicked his final keg at Steam Horse Brewing Co., a railroad-themed brewhouse that shuttered after six years in West Palm Beach.
Jennifer Lett / Sun Sentinel
Steam Horse Brewing Co., an industrial-chic, locomotive-themed craft brewery owned by Fran Andrewlevich, has permanently closed in West Palm Beach. (Jennifer Lett/South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
When he first opened, in 2018, his warehouse taproom overlooked knee-high grass and empty lots, but Andrewlevich smelled urban renewal. Yet the pandemic — plus road construction on Elizabeth Avenue last year — stunted growth in the nascent nightlife village, forcing him to rely on foot traffic from nearby food hall Grandview Public Market.
Responding to shrinking demands, Andrewlevich says he brewed “30, 40% less beer over the past 12 months.”
“We brewed less because they were drinking less,” he says. “The neighborhood never really formed, the regular drinker is watching their wallet, and every pizza parlor around has nice craft beers, so why bother visiting a taproom? Every piece of it took a chunk away from us.”
Andrewlevich’s sister Palm Beach County breweries to the north, Tequesta Brewing Co. and Twisted Trunk Brewing Co., will remain open and continue serving Steam Horse’s flagship brew, Steam Horse Lager. Both remaining taprooms are getting a makeover to handle South Florida’s new craft-beer landscape.
“We’re putting pizza ovens in both taprooms,” he says. “We have to evolve.”
Will craft beer ever be dominant again?
“We had 15 years of double-digit growth, but craft beer isn’t the newest, coolest, hippest thing anymore,” Andrewlevich says. “But everything is cyclical. It will come back.”
