House of Beer: HOB Brewing Company and the Life of Downtown Dunedin
There is a stretch of Huntley Avenue in downtown Dunedin where, within a single block, you can stand between two breweries. One of them is Cueni, which I wrote about as the first stop on this trail. The other, a couple of doors down at 931 Huntley, is HOB Brewing Company. HOB stands for House of Beer, and after enough visits, the name starts to feel less like branding and more like an accurate description of what the place actually is. A house. For beer. And for the people who drink it.
I get to HOB at least once a month. It is one of my three favorite breweries in Dunedin, alongside the Dunedin Brewery and 7th Sun, and I will get to both of those later in this series. This piece is about HOB, and I am writing it as someone who has spent real time on that patio, not as someone reporting on it from a distance. That distinction matters to me, and it should matter to you as a reader, because the internet is full of brewery write-ups by people who have never set foot in the door.
From Tap House to Brewery
HOB did not start as a brewery. It started as a tap house.
The original HOB Brewing Company opened in Dunedin in February 2009, and in those early years it was a place that poured other people’s beer, the best craft offerings the owners could pull together from national, regional, and local brewers. That was the whole idea at first. A good tap house in a town that was developing a serious thirst for craft beer.
After years of pouring everyone else’s beer, the owners decided to make their own. That is a familiar arc in craft brewing, but it is not a small step. Going from curating taps to filling them with what you brewed yourself is a different business and a different craft. HOB made that jump.
The two people behind it are Rick and Andy, and the way they tell their own origin story is worth knowing because it explains the character of the place. They met, discovered they both homebrewed, and started brewing beer in each other’s driveways. They joined the Dunedin Brewers Guild together. The friendship got sealed, in their own telling, at a Memorial Day keg party that Rick threw. The half barrel blew within the first hour. Andy happened to be there, Rick asked what he had on tap at home, and Andy said he had most a keg of Anchor Steam in his fridge. Rick asked to borrow it. Andy said sure, and they hauled it over on a hand cart. Rick decided then that anyone who will loan you the keg out of his own refrigerator is a friend for life.
That is the whole company, really, in one story. HOB is a brewery built by two friends who would lend each other the keg out of the fridge.
In September 2019, HOB opened the expansive outdoor patio and recreation area directly off the Pinellas Trail that defines the place today. That is the HOB most people now know.
What It Is Actually Like to Be There
The thing that makes HOB work is the space, and the space is mostly outside.
The patio is large. There is a covered two-story open-air pavilion, with a loft bar on the second floor that you can reach from two separate staircases, and an adjacent courtyard beyond that. It adds up to a lot of room, and the room is the point. HOB is not a cramped little taproom where you find a stool and stay put. It is a place you move around in. There is shade. There are fans running in the Florida heat. There is space for a big group and space for one person with a laptop, and both kinds of people are usually there at the same time.
I have done both. I have brought people. I have also sat there alone with a beer and my laptop, using the Wi-Fi, working through an afternoon. There is a particular pleasure in that, getting actual work done at an outdoor table in downtown Dunedin with something good in the glass, the trail going by, the day moving slow. Not every brewery makes that easy. HOB does. The space is generous enough that nursing one beer over two hours of work never feels like you are in anyone’s way.
The location is the other half of it. HOB sits right on the Pinellas Trail, and there is a free parking garage right next door, which in a walkable downtown that fills up is genuinely useful. But the better way to arrive is on foot or by bike off the trail itself, because once you are at HOB you are in the middle of downtown Dunedin, and downtown Dunedin is built for wandering. You can finish a beer at HOB, walk a couple of doors to Cueni, and keep going from there to more breweries, bars, and restaurants without ever getting back in a car. HOB is not a destination you drive to and drive home from. It is one stop on a walkable afternoon.
The Beer, and the Peanut Butter Blonde
HOB runs 24 taps. Typically 22 of them are beers made on site, plus a cider tap and a guest tap. The list changes often, the way it should at a brewery that likes to experiment, so the smart move on any visit is to look at what is current rather than walking in expecting a fixed menu.
But I will tell you my one. The Peanut Butter Blonde is the beer I love at HOB.
A peanut butter beer is the kind of thing that can go wrong easily. Done badly, it is a novelty, sweet and heavy and gimmicky, the sort of beer you have three sips of and abandon. HOB’s does not do that. The blonde ale underneath it stays light and easy, which is exactly right for the Florida climate, and the peanut butter sits on top of that as flavor rather than as dessert. It is the beer I put in the hand of someone visiting HOB for the first time, because it is distinctive enough to be memorable and balanced enough that you actually want to finish it and have another. In a 24-tap lineup that rotates constantly, the Peanut Butter Blonde is the one I look for first.
If you go, look at the full board, ask whoever is pouring what is new, and try a flight if you are deciding. But have the Peanut Butter Blonde at some point. That is my one piece of actual advice in this whole piece.
Why HOB Matters Here
There is a version of a brewery that exists only to sell beer. HOB is not that version. It is woven into the community, and I know that firsthand, because my Rotary club holds its annual cornhole tournament there.
That is not a small thing, and it is not a generic claim. Every year, our Rotary club runs a cornhole tournament at HOB, and the brewery makes it work, gives it a home, lets a community fundraiser take over the space. Andy, one of the owners, genuinely cares about the community. I have seen it. It is the difference between a business that tolerates a local group using its space and a business that actively wants to be the place where the community gathers. HOB is the second kind.
That shows up in the brewery’s wider life too. They host craft beer festivals. They throw events like silent discos. The pavilion gets used for weddings and private gatherings. HOB has set itself up, deliberately, as a place where things happen, not just a place where beer is sold. The cornhole boards in the courtyard, the big shaded patio, the loft bar, all of it is infrastructure for gathering.
This is worth saying plainly. When you spend your money at a place like HOB, you are not just buying a beer. You are supporting two friends who built a business from driveway homebrewing, and you are supporting a business that turns around and supports the community it sits in. That loop, local money staying local and coming back as community support, is the entire argument for independent local businesses. HOB is a working example of it.
Dunedin, and Why the Beer Scene Took Hold Here
It is worth stepping back to ask why downtown Dunedin has this many breweries within walking distance of each other in the first place.
Dunedin is a small city with Scottish roots, founded in 1899 and named after Edinburgh by the Scots who settled it. It has a compact, walkable downtown of a kind that most Florida cities never built or long ago paved over. It has the Pinellas Trail running straight through its core, which means a steady current of walkers and cyclists moving through the center of town all day. It has the famous golf cart culture, where people genuinely run their evening errands and bar visits by cart. And it has spent decades deciding, over and over, to protect the things that make it walkable and gathered rather than trading them away.
A craft beer scene needs exactly that kind of setting to flourish. Breweries are gathering places, and gathering places need foot traffic, density, walkability, and a community that wants to be out among itself. Dunedin offers all of it. The trail delivers people to the door. The downtown lets them move between five or six breweries on foot. The golf carts make it easy. The town’s whole character rewards being out rather than staying in.
That is why Dunedin has become one of the genuine craft beer destinations in Florida, and why a brewery trail through this town is a real thing you can actually walk. HOB is one stop on it. Cueni is two doors down. More are within a few blocks. The breweries did not create walkable Dunedin. Walkable Dunedin created room for the breweries.
Why Places Like HOB Matter
We are living through a stretch of years where it has gotten easy to never go anywhere. You can have everything delivered. You can be entertained without leaving a chair. You can go long stretches without being in a room of people you did not specifically plan to see.
Places like HOB are the counterweight to that. A brewery with a big shaded patio on a public trail, in the middle of a walkable downtown, is an invitation to do the increasingly rare thing of simply being out among other people. You go for a beer and you end up in a conversation. You bring your laptop and you get your work done with the life of the town moving around you. Your Rotary club holds its cornhole tournament there and three hundred small interactions happen that would not have happened otherwise.
That is what a House of Beer actually is, when the name is honest. Not just a place that sells beer. A house. Somewhere the community can come inside, sit down, and be together. Dunedin has several of these, and HOB is one of the good ones.
Go have a Peanut Butter Blonde on the patio. Watch the trail go by. Stay longer than you planned. That is the whole point of the place, and it is the whole point of the town it sits in.
This is the second stop on the Dunedin brewery trail. There are more to come, including the two other breweries on my own short list of favorites. For more on the town itself, see A Year in Dunedin, Dunedin Florida Parks Trails and Waterfront, and the Ultimate Guide to Dunedin Florida. And if you missed the first stop on the trail, it was Cueni Brewing.
About the author. I am Mark Middleton. I have lived in Dunedin since 2013, I get to HOB Brewing Company at least once a month, and my Rotary club holds its annual cornhole tournament there. HOB is one of my three favorite breweries in town. I am also a Realtor with Compass, leading Middleton Tampa Bay, though my work on this site is about Dunedin itself rather than real estate. The Dunedin brewery trail series continues, and I am always glad to hear which stops you think I should not miss.
