More craft breweries are on tap in Orlando
Confidence returning despite coronavirus
Motorworks Brewing was nearing the finish line on its new downtown Orlando brewery last March when the pandemic forced businesses across the country to shut their doors.
The location, an expansion for the Bradenton brewery, eventually opened in August after being pushed back several months.
“The response was great. It just wasn’t nearly as big as we would have expected otherwise,” said Barry Elwonger, Motorworks’ director of sales and marketing.
Craft breweries have continued to open in Orlando and across the country, even as the industry has struggled in the last year, and more are being planned.
There still were more openings than closings last year, but the gap has narrowed, according to Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson.
In 2019, the association tracked 319 closings and 1,020 openings. Watson said the closings figure for 2020 is expected to be similar while openings will likely be down about 30%.
But Watson said that much of that decline isn’t related to coronavirus, but to market maturity in many places. He added breweries usually take a year or two to plan.
“This is the year we’re really going to feel the COVID effect on openings,”
Watson said of 2021.
In Orlando, DeLand’s Persimmon Hollow Brewing Co. opened a second location last year near Lake Eola. Persimmon Hollow was also revealed by Disney World as a tenant in its new Flamingo Crossings Town Center development at Western Way and State Road 429 near Animal Kingdom.
Motorworks Brewing, meanwhile, is now seeing positive trends at its new Orlando site.
“I think that people are just starting to get their confidence up and feeling safe,” Elwonger said.
And other Orlando breweries are in the planning stages.
A project to convert a warehouse north of West Robinson Street and between North Parramore Avenue and North Terry Avenue into a brewery with a food truck court is being planned, city documents show.
In the Milk District, Travis Smith is planning Twelve Talons Beerworks in a former laundry mat at 2807 E. South St. He hopes to have his “boutique” brewery open by the fall or winter at the latest.
Smith said he was looking for a space at the start of last year and has owned the equipment for quite a while.
“I’ve been brewing for 12, going on 13 years, and have always wanted to do it for myself,” Smith said. “I would say it is very daunting, but starting now is better than starting in the beginning when we were going through shutdowns.”
For Longwood’s Hourglass Brewing, opening its Orlando Curry Ford Road location in June 2019 gave them just enough time to become a place people enjoyed visiting.
“I think we got really lucky,” said Troy Weyman, a partner in the business.
Hourglass Brewing, which started in Longwood in 2012 and still has a location there, saw sales fell more than 50% at the worst points in the pandemic compared with the same time the year before, according to Weyman.
Helping the business stay afloat were two rounds of Paycheck Protection Program funding. Weyman did not say how much of those funds Hourglass Brewing received.
“We were scraping bottom,” he said.
Now, things are moving in the right direction.
The Curry Ford brewery is back to where it should be while the Longwood brewery was still down about 15% in the first two months of the year, Weyman said. He hopes that axe throwing lanes added last month to the Longwood brewery will help draw in new customers.
While breweries have been hard hit, the Brewers Association’s Watson sees what is happening as more of a short-term market disruption. People still want to buy local offerings and still like visiting taprooms, he said.
“Long term, we still see lots of positive signs,” Watson said.
But Weyman is hesitant to make predictions.
“We live in a different world, and it’s hard to say which direction we’re going to go,” he said.