Downtown Microbrewery Readies for Fall Opening

Justin Stange and girlfriend Devon Kreps are partners in beer-making, and soon they’ll be partners in business.

They’re trying to open Seventh Sun Brewing Company at 1012 Broadway, just a short walk from downtown.

Now, that space is an empty, white room. When they get licensed, they will fill it with refrigerators, tanks and the rich aromas of fermenting beer.

They hope to open a microbrewery and personally serve their small-batch craft beers to a crowd interested in rare flavors.

“It’s for the real connoisseur who’s looking for a one-on-one experience at a brewery,” Stange said. “It’ll be like sitting in the brewer’s office.”

“It doesn’t have the beer factory feel,” Stange said. He wants the place to remain small enough that he and Kreps can work the taps largely by themselves. They want to give customers a chance to look the brewers in the eyes.

“We’re really concerned with presentation,” Stange said. “It’s going to come in proper glassware.”

They know  and aren’t far away. They don’t see those venues as competition so much as a way to put Dunedin on the map as a place where people from across the Tampa Bay area can come for rare and tasty brews.

Kreps and Stange live across the street from . Their house is very clean, with wood floors and dark furniture inside. On the back porch, there is a five-foot-tall tank that Stange uses to home-brew and experiment.

Kreps fell in love with beer-making because it combined science and art. She previously worked at Anheuser-Busch and Sweetwater Brewing Company. Stange also worked at Sweetwater and came to work at Cigar City in Tampa.

Beer in the past was produced in a less controlled and less sterile fashion than it is today, Kreps said. That meant that things floating around in the air at a brewery would end up in the beer, giving it a distinct, local flavor.

Seventh Sun is going to produce beer using some historical techniques. For example, they’ll add microorganisms other than yeast to get that distinct flavor. They’ll age some beer in oak barrels, similar to how wine is produced. They plan to use hops from the southern hemisphere and places as far away as New Zealand.

Kreps and Stange said they hope those techniques will achieve some pretty obscure beers.

“I’ve always appreciated craft beer,” Stange said. “Since I was old enough to drink ... and maybe before.”

Kreps said the latest Seventh Sun might be open is midnight on a Friday or Saturday. Prices will range from $5 to $8 per beer. They are shooting for an October opening.

You can visit their Facebook page for updates.

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