For more on South Florida's food scene, check out New Times' Taste guide, hitting newsstands Thursday, February 21.
For foodies, being encouraged to eat locally is nothing new. Farm-to-table as a culinary buzz term has been around a long time already. But supporting your local purveyors doesn't apply just to produce and pork products. What about those after-work suds that flow so freely?
Enter Florida's "Drink Like a Local" campaign, designed to get the Sunshine State's beer drinkers to put down the Budweiser and pick up a Cigar City Jai Alai IPA instead.
Launched less than a year ago by Ian Salzberg and John Linn of Brown Distributing, the rapidly growing campaign is all about encouraging Floridians to look to their own backyards when it comes to getting their brew on.
"We [Brown] rep a lot of Florida breweries, and we really just kind of wanted to help spread the word and make people aware," says Salz-berg. "A lot of people don't even know there are local breweries in Florida. We're fortunate that there's a lot of really great beer being made in Florida. For about ten years, we've kind of been behind the rest of the country, and we're finally starting to get some momentum."
Although the guys have a small marketing budget through Brown, the campaign is primarily grassroots. It's being built from the ground up by local restaurants, bars, and markets.
They try to stay local in all of their output, from hiring a Jacksonville-based artist for the logo design to buying Tampa-made branded pint glasses.
