Sitting at one of the high-top tables near the bar inside Seminole Heights’ warm, cavernous Florida Avenue Brewing, Aaron Barth asks a passing coworker if the kegs are ready for his trip. He’s headed to an Orlando beer fest on Friday, and wants to make sure he’s good to go.
“I try to get out to as many events as I can,” he explains, adding that, while hops and malt might come from anywhere, it’s the people that create the craft-beer community. “What is truly local about the beer, in my opinion, are the people. I like to go to events, talk to the people, get their feedback, and let them know we’re local, we’re in Tampa, you can come back to the brewery and get fresh beer.”
The 29-year-old brewer has been crafting his recipes at the Seminole Heights brewery for about nine months. He got into it in college by taking a course at Orlando’s University of Central Florida class called Quality Brewing and Fine Beer — “I got three credits to drink beer and talk about it” — then moved on to earn a certificate from UC Davis’s vaunted Master Brewers Program and set off traveling the world, helping make beer and open microbreweries from Australia to El Salvador before returning to west central Florida, near his original hometown of Seminole.
Here, Barth set about creating crisp, subtle, flavorful beers that are not only perfect for the Florida climate, but also accessible enough to serve as “gateway beers” for pedestrian beer drinkers who might be intimidated by craft beer’s perceived reputation as a playground for aggressive love-it-or-hate-it styles.
“I look at them as beers that bring people over from the mainstream breweries to the bolder flavors that craft breweries are doing,” he says. “I kind of feel like that’s an ignored part of the craft-beer community. People tend to think that if you do lighter flavor, it’s not craft beer. I disagree. They take the most skill — if you’re off by a little, you can tell a lot. And second, this is Florida, we need great summertime beers.”
Having achieved that end with Florida Ave.’s tasty IPA and ales, however, Barth is moving on to introducing some of those new craft-brew converts to some of the styles that would’ve been non-starters before patrons realized that small-batch beers can be just as palatable and easy to drink as their convenience-store cousins. He’s got a “super-boozy” Belgian rye coming that was aged in bourbon barrels, and has already enjoyed success with experiments ranging from a hop-forward double IPA to an innovative grapefruit Gose.
“I try to use the term ‘beer snob’ in a positive way, I call them craft-beer connoisseurs,” he says. “For a long time, they didn’t see Florida Avenue as their home. I’m here to change that.”
Favorite local beer that isn’t his: “That’s a tough one because they’re all really, really good. Four years ago, I might’ve been able to give you a definitive answer. These days there isn’t one, they’re all so good.”
His signature Florida Avenue beer: “For the brewery, it would be our IPA. It has hop character to it, but isn’t overbearing to the palate. My signature beer? I’m torn between the Belgian rye and the double IPA.”
Florida Avenue Brewing Co.
4101 N. Florida Ave., Tampa
813-374-2101, floridaavenuebrewing.com
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2014.