David Butler is no stranger to craft beer.
He uploads reviews three times a week to his blog “Florida Beer Blog.” He’s traveled across Florida to try craft beers from Jacksonville to Tampa to St. Lucie County.
When Butler, 45, learned about the “Sippin’ Seven Alachua County Ale Trail” on social media, he knew he had to trek the award-winning trail that stretches 23 miles from High Springs to Gainesville.
“A lot of people still consider breweries to be bars, especially in a college town. The only purpose for having alcohol is to get blackout drunk,” Butler said. “That's not really the case.”
The “Sippin’ Seven Alachua County Ale Trail” with seven breweries was a tourism campaign organized by the Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau. The campaign launched in November 2022 and used a free digital passport to encourage locals and tourists in Alachua County to explore local breweries.
According to the Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau, the digital passport was available through a third-party app called Bandwango. Visitors presented their passports to check in at the breweries and collected points. The points were used to redeem prizes like stickers, beer koozies, T-shirts, pint glasses and trucker caps.
The original breweries on the trail were Big Top Brewing Company – which closed during the campaign – Blackadder Brewing Company, Cypress & Grove Brewing Company, Daft Cow Brewery, First Magnitude Brewing Company, High Springs Brewing Company and Swamp Head Brewery.
Alachua County announced that the visitors bureau won the Henry Award for Niche Marketing at the 2024 Florida Governor’s Conference on Tourism for the trail’s passport campaign in a press release from Aug. 30.
The Henry Award is the first-place award of the Flagler Awards, a competition that recognizes tourism marketing across Florida. Tourism businesses or organizations can enter the awards under 18 categories for the chance to win.
According to the press release, the digital passport led to 15,600 visits to Alachua County breweries where 53% of passport holders were from outside the county. Butler, who lives in South Florida, was one of the visitors who traveled to Alachua to partake in the trail.
Butler completed the trail in two days. He spent his first day at High Springs Brewing Company. The next day, he started at Swamp Head Brewery and ended his trek at Daft Cow Brewery, where he stayed until he was the last person before closing.
He’s a big fan of ale trails, he said. “I had to get the baseball cap. That was just a requirement.”
Although he is familiar with different craft beers, he felt the passport helped the breweries feel more approachable. “The tap lists were not focused by a particular style of beer that only goes for beer nerds or snobs,” he said.
“It was not pretentious,” Butler said. “It was very much a welcoming, chill, laid-back experience.”
An inviting environment was exactly what Tourism Development Director Jessica Hurov and Tourism Development Manager Liz Reyes wanted to emphasize when they began organizing the ale trail.
The Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau recognized that Alachua County had a growing craft beer industry. Inspired by ale trails across Florida, they gathered breweries local to the county and proposed their campaign idea in fall 2022.
Ale trails are quite popular in Florida. While there is no exact number of how many trails are active during the year, multiple campaigns offer an opportunity to explore smaller cities across Florida.
Tampa Bay has organized an ale trail for seven years. Jacksonville’s “Jax Ale Trail” also provides a passport for customers to visit over 20 local breweries. Other ale trail locations spread across Daytona Beach, Orlando, Clearwater, St. Petersburg and Indian River County.
“There's a strong market segment of people who, when they travel to a destination, want an authentic, locally curated experience,” Hurov said. “They’re really looking to get a flavor of that community through food and beverage.”
The Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau entered the Flagler Awards after the year-long campaign ended. The team previously won a Henry Award for Consumer Resource Communications for its “What’s Good” weekly event guide for Alachua County in 2020.
Liz Reyes attended the Florida Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Tampa not knowing what award she’d be taking back to Gainesville. It would be another first-place award for the office.
To celebrate the win, more merchandise was made available for people to pick up at the Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau office at 33 N Main St. A small desk at the entrance of their office downtown is filled with stickers and koozies sporting Billy the Bison, who represents Payne’s Prairie, and seven birds that represent the breweries.
Greg Doyle, a 73-year-old self-proclaimed craft beer geek, was proud to trade in his points for the ale trail’s T-shirt. He spends his Fridays at High Springs Brewing Company, which led him to discover the ale trail when the passport campaign was active.
Doyle prefers going to local breweries over buying packs of beer at the grocery store. “It’s just so much more flavorful, so much more character than the big national brands,” Doyle said.
The passport allowed him to explore the more niche areas of High Springs, where he lives. He preferred breweries like Cypress & Grove that repurposed old, historical buildings into something new and exciting.
“They all have their unique personality,” he said. The trail also introduced him to new breweries he hadn’t explored like Blackadder Brewing Company.
Sissy Hart, the co-owner of Blackadder Brewing Company, found out her brewery contributed to an award-winning campaign when the Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau dropped off a thank you letter.
“It didn't really cost us anything to participate initially,” Hart said. “We were getting a new person in the door who hadn't been there before.”
She believes the campaign’s biggest contribution was bringing more awareness to Blackadder. Located at 618 NW 60th St., Hart was glad the trail included breweries on the outskirts of Gainesville and Alachua County.
“We sometimes get overlooked just by the location, not being in the downtown area,” she said.
Kiffin Ayers also received a thank you letter. As the head brewer and co-owner of High Springs Brewing Company at 18562 NW 237th St., High Springs, Fla. Ayers said that the local brewers all have a good working relationship with one another.
“Anything that can enhance our businesses and bring traffic to all of us is something that most everybody likes to participate in,” Ayers said.
Because the brewery is located near natural springs, it’s typical for High Springs to get tourists from other counties, states or countries who are exploring the area. Ayers was able to introduce the campaign to new visitors and get them to sign up.
Scott Brown, owner of Daft Cow Brewery at 13800 Tech City Circle, knew the campaign would be a good idea.
Daft Cow Brewery opened in July 2022, a few months before Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau approached him about the campaign. His brewery was the merchandise hub where passport holders visited Daft Cow to collect their merchandise. Daft Cow became one of the breweries with the most check-ins.
“We did have quite a few people that they never heard of us until they saw us on the passport,” said Brown. Its role as the “swag hub” drove in lots of traffic for the establishment.
Brown said that the passport didn’t always run smoothly. “We had a lot of complaints from the customers initially,” he said. “The redemption part in the beginning was really a nightmare.” At times, he had to approve points four times for one piece of merchandise because the app gave him trouble.
Pam Alexander, a 66-year-old recently retired nurse, also found herself struggling when she needed to open the digital passport. She’s been brewing beer since the 1980s and is a member of Gainesville’s Hogtown Brewers Homebrew Club, a local brewing club that also organizes community services events such as street clean-ups.
She learned about the passport campaign when visiting Big Top Brewing Company when it was still open in Gainesville. While she tried to participate in the campaign, she said the digital passport app was not user-friendly. She recalled it being hard to find and linked to another website that was difficult to navigate.
Therefore, she only checked in at three breweries in the campaign: Daft Cow, Blackadder and Big Top.
“I’m not completely unfortunate when it comes to technology,” Alexander said. “It was kind of a pain. What you got for it wasn’t really worth the trouble.”
She also remembered specific brews were discounted, and she wasn’t a fan of the limited options.
In the end, she did not collect enough points to redeem any prizes.
The Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau had no control over the app’s functionality but tried to fix issues to the best of its ability.
However, Alexander still believes that the trail was worth exploring.
“I would definitely do it again,” she said. “They would have to make a huge improvement.”
While the Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau did not mention relaunching the digital passport campaign or point system, the “Sippin’ Seven Ale Trail” is still an active trail advertised on its website. The trail even includes new breweries like Dry Wrought Cider Tap Room and Grand Scheme Brewing.
According to Hurov and Reyes, their goal is to continue highlighting the developing craft beer scene in Alachua County while exploring the touristic appeal of local breweries.
“They’re just a natural gathering place for folks who are seeking community,” Reyes said.