From 42 Taps to a Perfect Pint: The Hourglass District’s Beer and Pub Crawl
Hourglass Brewing's rotating wall, Roque Pub's 450 bottles and Claddagh Cottage's Guinness and sessions. Three rooms, three philosophies, one road.
3 minute read
Beer built the Hourglass District as surely as food did. The corridor holds three rooms with three entirely different ideas about what a pub is for, all within a short drive — or a sensible rideshare — of each other on Curry Ford Road. Taken together they make the strongest small-district beer crawl in Orlando. Taken one at a time, each is worth its own evening.
Hourglass Brewing: the brewery taproom
Start at the source. Hourglass Brewing at 2500 Curry Ford Road pours 42 rotating house beers on tap, plus nitro lines and a take-home fridge, in a repurposed church building with a patio and a food-truck rotation. The brewery, founded in Longwood in 2012 by two friends who started on a back porch, ranges across IPAs, lagers, sours and barrel-aged pours, so the correct order is a flight and an argument about it. Trivia on Tuesdays and district events through the calendar keep the room social rather than solemn. Our full profile is here.
Roque Pub: the deep list
East at 3076 Curry Ford Road, Roque Pub is the connoisseur’s room: a family-owned neighbourhood craft beer, wine bar and eatery, in its own words, boasting 30 rotating craft taps and more than 450 craft bottles and cans from around the world, plus a full wine list. Curry Ford West’s own business spotlight adds a detail regulars prize — the Curry Ford Lager, a collaboration pour associated with the district itself. The kitchen is a real gastropub kitchen, anchored by burgers like the double-stacked Pub Dub, and the room runs monthly beer events: pint nights, tap takeovers, brewery spotlights and charity fundraisers, with live music and a dog-welcoming patio. Roque also keeps the corridor’s latest hours, which makes it the crawl’s natural final stop.
Claddagh Cottage: the traditional pub
West at 2421 Curry Ford Road, Claddagh Cottage Irish Pub is the soul of the three. Established in 1995 by Jimmy and Kathy at an earlier Curry Ford location, it was taken on by Scott Vocca and Vicki Gish when redevelopment forced the original out, closed after a final New Year’s Eve in 2016, and reopened here in 2018 — carrying, Scott Joseph reported, even the old front door, now the entrance to the kitchen. The pub pours a Guinness it is proud of, serves cottage pie, steak and ale pie, Scotch eggs and sausage rolls, and hosts the every-other-Wednesday traditional Irish session that Vocca and Gish have run since 2001, plus live music at weekends. Darts, a fireplace, a snug: the full traditional grammar, rebuilt with love on Curry Ford Road.
How to run the crawl
Do it in the order the evening wants: a flight at Hourglass Brewing while the light lasts, dinner built into the crawl — Roque’s kitchen or Claddagh’s pies both qualify — and a final, unhurried pint where the night lands. Plot the three on the Orlando Top Spots Map, arrange the ride home before the first flight, and note that neighbouring Milk District bars are nearby — nearby, and a different crawl for a different night. This one’s road is Curry Ford, and three rooms are plenty.
The crawl also accommodates the non-beer drinker better than most. Roque Pub carries a full wine list alongside its taps and bottles, Hourglass Brewing stocks wine, seltzers and cider-style options for the gluten-free and the simply unpersuaded, and Claddagh Cottage is, before anything else, a whiskey-and-Guinness room where the beer list is a supporting act. Mixed groups — the true test of any pub crawl — can run this corridor without anyone nursing a drink they did not want. Add the food at all three stops, from Roque’s burgers to Claddagh’s pies, and the evening never has to choose between drinking well and eating properly.
What unites the three rooms, beneath the different philosophies, is ownership that shows up. Roque’s owner was a founding figure in the Curry Ford West Main Street organisation itself; Claddagh’s owners personally carried the pub through its closure and rebuild; Hourglass put its own name over the district’s door. Corridor pubs survive on regulars, and regulars are made by proprietors who are visibly in the room. On Curry Ford Road, they are.
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