my view is skewed a little more towards Pinellas, but here goes....
When we had the Craft Beer drought, there was The Dunedin Brewery.. TBBC was in the little 2-story building in Ybor, WoB (store) in Clearwater, the Independant in St Pete, Dunderbacks was a quaint little place in University mall, and we had the first of the three Old Chicago's close, the one in Clearwater... supposedly for lack of sales or lack of a craft beer market... which I called BS on in several newsgroups... 'all management' I said, too much greed and wanting to make money on food... and too much bowing down to Great Bay and Pepin, the Budweiser distributors.. There were several other places I am not sure, or cannot remember, but were probably around. Being a member of the Dunedin Brewer's Guild, becoming a BJCP judge, and knowing many of the Tampa Bay Beers members, I could see the desire for craft beer places... The first sign of life was an announcement that BJ's was coming to town.. I had been to a BJ's before and loved their beer, so I made sure everyone I knew was aware... I think that they more than proved the 'not a market for craft beer' theory wrong, even in Pi-nellas park BJ's had wait list every night for years and years after opening.. WoB opened, and was fun a couple times, but was a bit of a drive and was full of uppity westchasians and their my nose is far up in the air that I might drown if it rains... I stopped going when they had all the TV's turned to the seminole/gator game during their Oktoberfest(I think it was the first one) and I could not get a beer because of all the wannabe football players ordering Miller Lite.. The next big thing was Tony opening Oldsmar Tap House... it was good and bad... it was great in that we had a great guy with great knowledge about beer, a central location, and NO TV's.. people came in and played board games and he had live music once a week.. the bad news? lots of people saw the business model worked, and copied him, and now we really have a glut of high tap count places...
The rest is history, TBBC spent forever moving into their gucci spot in Centro Ybor, JB moved into a nice place, Andy and Rick opened the HoB in Dunedin, TWillard's opened, Savino got out of the WoB bar and opened Brew Garden, and eventually sold the WoB store, WoB bars started popping up "like McDonald's"(quoting the waitress at WoB in St. Pete on this one)...
My opinion? Support your local craft beer joint the most, and enjoy visits to the others...
-mike
__________________
|