Indiana Brewery With FL Craft Brewing Ties To Open Sarasota Brewery, Taproom This Summer

SARASOTA, FL — An Indiana brewery with ties to Florida’s craft brewing scene is opening a brewery and taproom in Sarasota this summer.

Sun King Brewery will take over JDub’s Brewing Company’s former 5,000-square-foot flagship location at 1215 Mango Ave. JDub’s closed its Sarasota location last year after struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sun King began distributing its beer in Florida in 2017 after hiring its now vice president of sales, Joe Burns, the former national sales manager for Tampa’s Cigar City Brewing and a Sarasota resident.

Burns left Cigar City in 2016 when the brewery was purchased by a private equity firm, Fireman Capital, which also owned other nationally known craft beer brands, like Oskar Blues Brewery. He was slated to take over as the firm’s Southeast sales manager when he decided to switch gears.

“I decided it wasn’t for me,” he said.

A native of Bloomington, Indiana, Burns had gotten to know Dave Colt and Clay Robinson, Sun King’s co-founders and owners, through beer events over the years.

“So, I called them up and asked them, ‘You guys looking for an old guy that knows how to sell beer?’” he said.

Burns and his wife, who’s also an Indiana native, moved back north for his new role, but they missed Florida, and after 18 months, they returned to their Sarasota home.

“We wanted to get acclimated to the (Sun King) brewery and wrap ourselves around the culture of it, but we never sold our house down in Sarasota,” he said. “We love this area. We’ve been here since 2000. We kept our house — it’s kind of like a dream home for us — in case we ever wanted to come back.”

During his stint in Indiana, Sun King started to distribute its beer in Florida and had big plans for the Sunshine State. With significant sales distribution there, it made sense to have Burns based in Florida.

“This was way before remote working was a normal thing, but a lot of what he does can be done remotely, with distributor relations and other things,” Robinson said. “We said, ‘You’re not quitting. Let’s just figure it out.’ We saw so much potential in Florida anyway.”

From there, sales in the Sunshine State took off, he said. “Florida quickly grew to be our best out-of-state market…Florida really took to Sun King.”

And Midwesterners who vacation or snowbird in Florida recognize the brand, he added.

While Sun King has statewide distribution, its best markets in Florida have been the Sarasota region, the Space Coast and the Jacksonville area, Burns said.

Then, the pandemic hit, causing “a bit of a setback for Sun King,” Robinson said. “Over the course of 2020, we pulled back from all of our outside markets.”

In Florida, distributors focused mainly on local beers and Sun King’s sales there suddenly dropped, he added. “2020 was such a weird year for beer. Everything shifted to grocery stores. The taprooms closed. And 99.5 percent of our beer was sold in Indiana. So, we focused our growth in Indiana.”

But there isn’t much room for more growth in Indiana, and the company wanted to ensure that it maintained a foothold in Florida, Robinson said.

As the United States recovers from the pandemic, Sun King currently has three sales representatives based in Florida.

“The number one question they get asked is ‘Where in Florida is Sun King?’ which made us think, why isn’t there a Sun King in Florida?” Robinson said. “Florida has a lot of people. It’s hot there all the time, so perfect beer-drinking weather. And lots of people visit.”

Colt and Robinson asked Burns to look around for potential properties to build a home for Sun King in Florida.

“Something that would give us a physical presence,” Robinson said. “Somewhere we could immerse people in Sun King’s culture, that way if they asked us on the streets, ‘Where’s Sun King,’ we could point to a physical location and tell them to come and enjoy our beers.”

Burns added, “It gives us that local edge that we always wanted.”

Sarasota’s new Sun King brewery and taproom will offer anywhere from 20 to 30 beers at a time.

At the moment, only its core beer line-up — the “approachable” Sunlight Cream Ale, the Orange Vanilla Sunlight Cream Ale, the Pachanga Mexican-style lager and its hazy IPA, the Keller Haze — are available through distribution in Florida, Robinson said.

The planned brewery and taproom will introduce the brand’s other beers to Florida and will also eventually create new ones, as well.

“With the advent of the Florida brewery, it gives us the opportunity to brew beer specifically for Florida and experiment a little bit more with the tastes of Floridians,” he said.

While Burns will oversee the new brewery, he’ll continue his work as the company’s vice president of sales. And he looks forward to Sun King becoming a part of the Sarasota community.

“We're very local up in Indiana, in particular, with all of our locations and we've really engrained ourselves into the community by working with a lot of nonprofits,” he said.

Before the pandemic, Sun King’s other locations hosted hundreds of events each year and worked with more than 350 nonprofit partners. Burns plans to operate similarly in Sarasota while giving the new taproom its own Florida touch.

“I want to stress that we’re not putting an Indiana brewery in Sarasota. We are going to be putting a Sarasota brewery down here. It’s really going to have that local flair,” he said. “A lot of things are definitely going to change to really be local. We’re not just trying to drop a cookie cutter down here. That’s not what we’re going to do. We want to be engrained in the local community and with our local nonprofits.”