A strip mall in Largo might not be the first place one thinks of when it comes to some of the Bay area's most adventurous craft beers, but Arkane Aleworks' head brewer and co-owner Dan Graston isn't worried about not being in the thick of some downtown cluster of taprooms.
"I don't think we ever looked at it that way," he said. "This location had a lot of things going for it as far as demographics and parking.
"We might have more parking than any brewery in the area," he added with a laugh.
Arkane's been drawing drinkers in from far and wide for more than a year and a half now on the strength of its crazy-wide variety of brews, particularly its sours, which are spoken of in comparison to such big area names as 7venth Sun and Angry Chair. And sours, like Zoolander's Hansel, are so hot right now. But for Graston and co-owner Joe Scheibelhut — who homebrewed together for a decade before cutting their production teeth with local legend and sour-master Greg Rapp — playing with those different flavors and styles is less about chasing local and national trends, and more about being inspired by the innovation and ingenuity of their peers.
"We were influenced by the creativity," Graston said. "We always said we were going to brew a lot of stuff, and let the customers decide what the best beers were. But we still try to do a little bit of everything. We try to have five or six categories up on the board."
At press time, the taplist includes not only plenty of great sours like the Pucker Punch (a ginger-blood orange Florida weisse) and Mezkin Blackbird (a blackberry-sage gose), but also a stout, a brown ale, an amber, a pale ale and a quirky take on the ubiquitous IPA. It's a testament to not only Arkane's ambition, skill and verve, but also its commitment to bringing even more options to an area that already enjoys an insane amount of options for an ever-growing legion of craft beer drinkers.
"It's still a more collaborative than competitive spirit [among Bay area brewers]," Graston said. "We're not checking out what everybody else is doing to influence what we do. We're aware of it, but we don't let what other breweries are doing decide exactly what we're gonna do or how we're gonna run our place."
2480 East Bay Drive #23, Largo. 727-270-7117.
This article appears in Feb 15-22, 2018.