Windermere Brewing Company Is the Town’s Living Room
Born from the lakes and five years in the making, this house-like taproom on Fifth Avenue pours small-batch beer, hosts trivia and live music — and brews a house beer for the pizzeria across the block.
3 minute read
Windermere Brewing Company does not look like a brewery, and that is the first thing it gets right. The taproom at 111 West 5th Avenue, a few steps off Main Street and just behind Dixie Cream Cafe, reads as a house that happens to pour exceptional beer — which suits a town where the commercial district is three brick blocks and the dress code is lake life. The brewery’s own tagline says it plainly: born from the lakes.
Homebrew patience, professional patience
Co-founders Dr. Joe Ata and Andy McGhee worked toward this taproom for years before it existed. They began brewing together in 2017, making beer at McGhee’s house while they pursued town approval for a microbrewery — no small thing in a town as protective of its character as Windermere. The council approved the plans, the old house on the Fifth Avenue site came down, and after a groundbreaking in the spring of 2021 the 2,500-square-foot taproom opened in July 2022. A brewery that took five years to open in a town of two square miles is a brewery that was always going to do things the slow way — which is also how good beer gets made.
The room, the yard, the week
Inside, the taproom is compact and warm; outside is where Windermere Brewing spreads out. The front and back yards work like a neighbor’s lawn party — picnic seating, green space, dogs welcome and everywhere. The beer list rotates through small batches: crisp lagers in the helles tradition, a Belgian tripel, peach wheat ales and IPAs with names pulled from the local landscape. A smash burger from the kitchen has developed its own following, pretzel bites with beer cheese do the rounds, and food trucks fill out the calendar on busier nights.
The weekly rhythm is part of the draw. Tuesday trivia packs the room with regulars; Friday evenings bring live music; and the brewery’s event calendar layers in everything from bingo to pet-adoption fundraisers with local rescue groups. It functions, in other words, the way a small-town brewery should — as the living room the town’s living rooms spill into.
Why a brewery fits this town
It is worth pausing on how unlikely a brewery in downtown Windermere once seemed. This is a town that fines cut-through drivers, keeps its roads unpaved on purpose and debates moving a schoolhouse like it is a constitutional question. A taproom had to be argued for, designed down to a residential scale and run by people the town already knew — Ata and McGhee brewed in the neighborhood for five years before the first commercial pint was poured. The result is a brewery with a house’s footprint, a yard instead of a parking-lot patio, and a crowd that arrives on foot and by golf cart. Visitors from the theme-park corridor, fifteen minutes away, tend to lower their voices when they walk in. Everybody does. The place has that effect.
For families, the calculus is easy: the yard gives kids room, the food trucks and kitchen give them dinner, and the adults get beer brewed a few feet away. For beer travelers, the small-batch rotation rewards repeat visits — the list you drank from in spring will not be the list pouring in fall.
The beer that explains Main Street
The single best detail about Windermere Brewing is what it brews for somebody else. When Fresco Pizzeria opened across the block in December 2025, the brewery created an Italian-style beer designed specifically as the pizzeria’s house partner — two independent owners deciding their businesses should work together rather than merely coexist. Order the pairing in either room and you are tasting the moment Windermere’s Main Street stopped being a collection of storefronts and became a district.
The brewery opens afternoons most days and earlier on weekends, running later on Fridays and Saturdays; check its calendar for the week’s music and truck lineup before you go. It anchors the evening end of a Main Street that now also includes Solvino and the Friday farmers market crowd by day. Find it on our Orlando Top Spots Map and in the Windermere hub — and if you are only going to do one Windermere evening, do it here, outside, with the string lights on and a lager sweating in your hand.
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