Hourglass Brewing: 42 Taps in a Former Church
Founded in Longwood in 2012, Hourglass Brewing's second taproom at 2500 Curry Ford Road gave the district its name in a glass — and its living room.
3 minute read
Some names are marketing. This one is a coincidence that became a destiny. Hourglass Brewing had been brewing in Longwood since 2012 when it opened its second location on Curry Ford Road — in, of all places, the Hourglass District, the young corridor named for nearby Hourglass Lake. As food writer Scott Joseph noted at the time, the brewery moved into a space previously occupied by a church, in a development whose restaurants were being fitted out around it. The result, at 2500 Curry Ford Road, is the Hourglass District‘s gathering spot: a roomy taproom with indoor and outdoor seating, a dog-friendly patio reputation, and a tap list long enough to require a strategy.
The beer, in breadth
The district taproom pours 42 rotating Hourglass beers on tap, plus nitro taps and a stocked fridge of cans and bottles to take home — the brewery’s own description, and the number every regular quotes. The range is the point: IPAs and lagers alongside sours, barrel-aged pours and the playful one-offs that made the Longwood original a destination, including names regulars cite like the I-4 Eyesore Florida lager, a mimosa sour and an Irish red. The founding story is part of the furniture here: two friends who started brewing on a back porch, funded the first tiny taproom by selling toy collections and musical equipment, and grew it into a multi-hundred-seat brewery that was named a Florida Brewery of the Year in 2017. The Curry Ford room is smaller and more neighbourhood in feel, which suits it.
A taproom that behaves like a local
What makes Hourglass more than a beer list is how thoroughly it has been adopted. Trivia runs on Tuesday evenings, bingo and food trucks rotate through the calendar, and the taproom serves as a stop for Curry Ford West district events — the Main Street organisation’s programming regularly routes through this room. Food is handled the taproom way: trucks outside on scheduled days, and a genuinely short walk to dinner — F&D Woodfired Italian Kitchen, Tamale Co. and Foxtail Coffee are all within a minute or two, a fact visiting reviewers notice with gratitude. Order at the bar, take the glass to the patio, and let the evening assemble itself; that is the local pattern, and it works on a Tuesday as well as a Saturday.
How it fits the corridor
Hourglass Brewing is the hinge of the district. Mornings belong to Shaka Donuts and Foxtail; evenings, more often than not, start or end here, with Claddagh Cottage’s traditional sessions and Roque Pub’s deep list as the other poles — see our Hourglass District pubs and craft beer guide for the full crawl. If you are building a first visit, put the brewery at the centre of it on the Orlando Top Spots Map: a flight early, dinner a short walk away, a final pour after. A brewery that shares its name with its district could easily have felt like a gimmick. Instead it feels like the reason the name stuck.
The Longwood original is worth knowing about, because it explains the Curry Ford room’s confidence. What began as a twelve-seat taproom grew, in the brewery’s own telling, into a 280-seat craft brewery, and the company describes itself today as a two-location, independent, all-natural craft brewery. The district location inherits that range without inheriting the scale: the same willingness to pour a traditional brown ale beside an experimental sour, in a room sized for a neighbourhood rather than a destination crowd. For Orlando beer drinkers, that combination — a serious brewery’s full repertoire at a corner-taproom scale — is the offer, and it is why the Curry Ford taproom reads less like an outpost and more like the brewery’s second home.
Practicalities reward a little planning. The taproom keeps long daily hours, opening late morning and running into the evening, later at weekends, and the fridge by the bar covers the take-home half of the visit: cans and bottles of the pours you liked, for the fridge at home. Food trucks rotate on scheduled days, and on the days they do not, the corridor itself is the food plan — tamales, tacos and wood-fired Italian all sit within a couple of minutes’ walk, and bringing dinner back to a patio table is the established local manoeuvre.
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