If a cold, refreshing pint doesn’t wet your whistle, you’re still in luck at LauderAle Brewery. We have options for everyone, including a selection of wines, sangria & champagne, ciders, vodka seltzers, sake, non-acholic options, and craft sodas. The beer is a star at LauderAle, but our community is what matters most. So even if beer isn’t your jam, we’ve got something for you to help you settle into our ever-growing tribe.
People are the backbone of LauderAle Brewery. From our GM, Miranda, to our resident beer wizard, Jimmy, to our kickass beertenders, LauderAle thrives on good people making good beer. Our staff’s experience and training are amongst the highest in the local beer scene—we’re all Cicerone Certified Beer Servers, so you can expect next-level professionalism and high-level beer IQs. Bet you can’t find another brewery around that has these skills. Want to snag a taste or have questions about an unfamiliar beer style? Just ask. We know our stuff, and we want to know what we can do to get you what you like. Our goal is to be like a second home for our awesome community of craft beer enthusiasts.
LauderAle Brewery has gone from a five-gallon bucket to a must-visit treasure, celebrated in Fort Lauderdale and all over South Florida. What an adventure that started from a conversation between friends. Like every great idea, LauderAle was conceived between buddies over a few beers. We stumbled upon this idea one night at a local craft beer bar. While bantering about possible inventions and other business ideas, the one that stuck was how fun and adventurous it would be to own a brewery.
The only problem: We were rookies at brewing beer. At the time, Kyle was a 10-year veteran of the residential real estate game, and Joey was—and still is—a naval architect working for Resolve Marine, a maritime salvage and emergency solution group. Our backstory is steeped in South Florida and the sea, and those inspirations shine through in the beer.
Now that we had come up with this risky idea and decided to give it a go, we had to come up with a name. How could we combine where we are from with the bold, new endeavor? Fort Lauderdale and beer. LauderAle came like a freight train and just seemed too good to pass up. The hard part is remembering who came up with it. To this day, we still argue over who came up with the name.
The day after our drunken epiphany, we ordered a home-brew kit. Shortly after, we started brewing on a stovetop in Kyle’s 500-square-foot second-floor apartment.
After months of testing and sharing with friends and family, we moved into Joey’s garage and upped the ante to a 15-gallon, all-grain system we custom-built ourselves. The new system seemed high-tech compared to the stovetop one.
We kept experimenting and refining recipes, and the demand grew within our circle and community.
We quickly moved our brewing system into a 3,200-square-foot warehouse in a small industrial district between Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Port Everglades near the FPL power plant, which seemed like the perfect location for a couple of Fort Lauderdale natives (if you’re a native as well, you’ll recognize the tap handles and our bartenders would be happy to tell you the history if you don’t).
Now, over a decade after opening South Florida’s first nano brewery, we are going stronger than ever, having won several highly recognized beer awards: Gold & Silver at the Best Florida Beer Competition for our foreign export stout, Black Mamba. We also won a Silver Medal at the U.S. Open Beer Championship for Black Mamba. Additionally, we won a Gold for our Coconut Porter at the Great American Beer Festival. Lastly, we won a Bronze Medal for our Belgian Tripel, Pieces of 8, at The Best of Craft Beer Awards and took home a Silver Medal at the same event for our Belgian Quad named Quintessence.
Today, LauderAle Brewery has a 3 BBL electric-fired brewhouse with 13 fermenters and 5 brite tanks. We often double batch into 7 BBL fermenters, producing about 1,000 BBLS annually. We’ve dipped our toes into distribution, but we’ve found the freshest place to enjoy our brews is directly from the tap at LauderAle.
As the story of LauderAle continues, we’re humbled to have been able to serve up almost 1 million pints of beer to our community so far, and we can’t wait to welcome you into our taproom for your next cold one.
Cheers,
Joey & Kyle
