Bowigens Beer Company: The Brewery Pouring at the Center of Avalon Park
Named for founders Bobby Bowen and Kevin Wigen, Bowigens brings its creative Casselberry-born craft beer — 407 Pils, Avalon Park Amber, 7 Layer Stout — to the Marketplace taproom.
3 minute read
Ask where Avalon Park drinks, and the answer is a stall inside its food hall. Bowigens Beer Company operates the taproom at the Marketplace at Avalon Park, 3801 Avalon Park East Boulevard, running the hall’s indoor-outdoor bar and pouring some of the most creative craft beer in Central Florida to a crowd that mostly walked there. For a planned town that promised its residents they would never need to leave, a proper local brewery was not a luxury. It was load-bearing.
A name, and a history
Bowigens — pronounced boh-WEE-ghens — compresses the surnames of its two owners, Bobby Bowen and Kevin Wigen. Bowen began brewing in his apartment in New York City, moved to Florida to work in a brewery, and in 2014 opened the original Bowigens brewery and taproom in Casselberry. The operation has since grown to three footprints: the Casselberry taproom with its small brewery, a production facility in Longwood, and the Avalon Park taproom, which arrived with the Marketplace and gives the east side a brewery of its own. Visit Orlando counts Bowigens among the destination’s notable craft breweries, and its Avalon Park room is the one with a food hall attached.
What to drink
The house style is restless: rotating taps, bold flavors, and a core lineup with local names. The 407 Pils is a German-style pilsner named for Orlando’s area code, treated with salt and lime. The Avalon Park Amber is named for this taproom — ordering the beer named after the town, in the town, is the correct move. The 7 Layer Stout is brewed with seven different malts for the dark-beer loyalists, and the wider list runs through IPAs, sours and seasonal experiments; the Avalon Park dining guide summarizes the range as IPAs, stouts, sours and more, which undersells the rotation. Order a flight if it is your first visit. The tap list changes often enough that regulars check what is new before they commit.
The room, and the arrangement
The genius of the Avalon Park setup is the pairing. Bowigens has no kitchen of its own here because it does not need one: the Marketplace’s vendors surround the bar, so your pint can meet Argentinian empanadas, sushi, a smash burger or a cheese board without anyone leaving the building. Seating spills outdoors, the atmosphere is laid-back and family-tolerant in the way of a true neighborhood taproom, and the hours mirror the hall’s — days through evenings, later on Friday and Saturday. It functions simultaneously as the food hall’s bar, downtown’s pub and the neighborhood’s default meeting point, which is a lot of jobs for one taproom and it handles all of them.
Why it matters to the town
Suburban taprooms usually sit in retail strips and draw from a drive-shed. Bowigens Avalon Park draws from a walk-shed — porches and apartments and townhomes arranged around a lake, in a downtown designed so that the brewery is a stroll, not a trip. That is the New Urbanist bet paying out in a pint glass. Pair a visit with dinner from the stalls in our Marketplace profile, then take the long way home around Avalon Lake. More on the town around it at our Avalon Park hub, and find the taproom on the Orlando Top Spots Map.
Know before you pour
A few practical notes for a first visit. The Avalon Park taproom keeps the Marketplace’s rhythm — open through the day and evening, later on Friday and Saturday — and shares the hall’s seating, so there is no separate door to hunt for: enter the Marketplace and follow the taps. Because the stall lineup around the bar rotates, the best pairing changes with the season; ask the bartender what the newest kitchen in the hall is doing and build the flight around it. The brewery also runs the kind of taproom programming a neighborhood expects — flagship specials and community nights appear on its channels — and its beers travel: the Casselberry original and the Longwood production facility mean a favorite pour here can usually be found again elsewhere in Central Florida. Start here, though. This is the room the Avalon Park Amber was named for.
Best for: craft-beer drinkers on the east side tired of driving to Mills 50 or Sanford, food-hall groups who want a real brewery pour, and anyone collecting Orlando’s named-after-the-place beers.
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