My friend and colleague, Gerard Walen, has an interesting story on CraftBeer.com about a mobile brewery that drove from Florida to Oregon. In Collaboration On the FL-ORegon Trail, Walen details the rolling brewery built by the Dunedin Brewery and its journey to Oregon, and then on to Denver for GABF. Check it out. Gerard can normally be found on Road Trips For Beer, and recently finished the Florida Breweries book in the same series as my northern California guidebook, which will be published this April.
The Mobile Brewhouse.
Not to disparage the author of the Florida Breweries book but I doubt his efforts were as time-consuming as yours when you wrote your immensely valuable & informative guide to Northern California breweries. I continually refer to it & have planned 5 or 6 road trips intending some day to visit a few of those I haven’t yet been to.
As the author of “Florida Breweries” … I have to agree. I was nearing the end of writing the book when Jay’s was published. I think my jaw literally dropped when I saw the number of breweries in his book. It made the 66 breweries and brewpubs in my book seem a bit paltry in comparison to his book’s 161. Of course, Northern Cali is the birthplace of the modern craft beer movement, and Florida’s brewery boom didn’t really start until the mid-2000s, though we have a few that have been around since the ’90s.
At our current growth rate, however, I expect our brewery count to be around 100 by the end of 2014. Already a handful have opened in the few months since I submitted the book to the publisher, and a couple of dozen or so more are on the way.
We might not compare in quantity – yet – but quality-wise there are plenty of excellent, brews being produced in Florida. I encourage every craft beer fan to come visit us, and if you’d like to purchase the “Florida Breweries” book before your visit – after it comes out April 1, 2014, even better!
To give you an idea of where our current craft brewery industry stands, take a look at this brewery map and list on my “Beer in Florida” blog (provided I can make the link work).
Florida Brewery Map and List
Cheers!