St. Petersburg Distillery opens new garden, just the start of huge expansion

ST. PETERSBURG — The president of St. Petersburg Distillery looked up at the four silos recently installed in the active construction zone behind their current tasting room, squinting toward the noon sun at the towering stainless steel tanks.

Installed in 2022, these 68-ton, 35-foot-tall containers used for holding grain are the centerpiece of a massive renovation and expansion coming to the space between 31st and 28th streets S near the Pinellas Trail.

“You know, it’s a pain in the butt to build a real working distillery in Florida, especially on this peninsula of a peninsula we’re on,” said Matt Armstrong. “That’s why real distilleries don’t exist here like they do in other states.”

Armstrong and the rest of the 10-person team at St. Petersburg Distillery are working to change that. On Friday, the distillery’s new Spirit Garden will hold its grand opening, the chic outdoor space marking the beginning of a multiyear project that will include a new tasting room, a lab and, eventually, an event hall, another outdoor space and a rooftop restaurant on their 28-acre plot of land.

When Armstrong talks about “real distilleries,” he’s talking about ones in places like Kentucky: Maker’s Mark, Buffalo Trace, the big names. Places where the grain is procured from nearby farms and the well water used in the production of spirits like bourbon and whiskey might come from the ground underneath the distillery.

That’s not exactly common in Florida.

“We drilled 100 feet down into the ground and the water was still 73 degrees,” instead of an ideal 60 degrees or less, said Armstrong.

St. Petersburg Distillery is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday for tastings and tours, but has mainly focused on producing its from-scratch liquors since it was founded in 2014: Old St. Pete Gin, Banyan Reserve Vodka, Oak and Palm Rum and Tippler’s Orange Liqueur. The bottles are sold in liquor stores all over, and featured in cocktails at Tampa Bay bars.

The Spirit Garden opening marks not just a transformation of their current space but of the company’s mindset and business model, too.

“Soul-searching” is too dramatic a term for what Armstrong and his team did back around 2020, he said, shortly after the pandemic upended everyone’s lives. But it’s not far off.

“We had to sit down and think about who we were, and who we wanted to be,” Armstrong said. “We finally decided, we’re not going to try to be everyone else.”

For the distillery, that meant scaling up — and outward into the community — to be able to create a product that is distinctly Floridian. Over the past four years, they’ve purchased new equipment that will allow them to produce more liquor than they ever have, which will help with the ultimate goal: Keep things local.

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This coincided with a major shift in the Florida distillery industry: In 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill eliminating production caps on licensed distilleries in the state. Starting that summer, distilleries were able to produce 250,000 gallons annually, three times the quantity previously allowed.

Each one of those new silos at the distillery can hold 64 to 68 tons of grain, each about the size of a rail car, which is crucial to their efforts to keep the production process contained to the Sunshine State. When the amount of spirits they could produce was capped, it didn’t make sense financially to partner with local farms to buy ingredients, so they had to source from other parts of the country for things like corn and rye.

Producing more allowed them to embark on a partnership with a family-owned farm in Hamilton County in North Florida, from which they now get their grain.

“Even though we may yield less from a place like that, the products that actually come from Florida have a different taste and flavor profile,” Armstrong said. “It’s a good thing for folks traveling the world looking for different experiences and flavors.”

Walking through the distillery on a recent weekday, Armstrong and Yisleny Serrano, the tasting room manager and events coordinator, talked about wanting to take the public along on that grain-to-glass journey.

They scooted around a maze of tubes, clear in some parts, that will allow those taking a tour at the new facility to see grain flowing from the silos to the next part of the distilling process.

Armstrong pointed out the room that will become a lab, where tasters will test in-the-works spirits. Just above that, a new upstairs tasting room experience will cap each public tour.

“The idea is to innovate and create things that don’t exist yet instead of copying stuff,” Armstrong said. “If people want peanut butter whiskey, they can get that somewhere else.”

Armstrong, who is currently vice president of the Florida Craft Spirits Association, and his team helped with the creation of the Florida Distillery Trail, which is modeled after Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail. They’re passionate about creating tourism that will attract liquor enthusiasts looking for something unique.

“We’re okay with our product not being like Kentucky’s,” Armstrong said. “Because it will be like Florida. We know now who we are as a company.”

The new Spirit Garden is a bridge to what’s to come. A large outdoor space that sits in front of the distillery’s current front door, it’s made up of a handful of shipping containers outside of which guests can lounge in covered seating. In one container, there’s a bar that will serve cocktails made with the distillery’s spirits. In another, the new Cala Italian Kitchen (from the folks behind the temporarily closed St. Petersburg restaurant Italy Bottega) will be cooking food to order. Armstrong said they eventually want to bring in local artists to paint a mural on the pavement.

The rest of the renovations are a ways off: The new tasting room and lab in the main building should be done by this time next year, Armstrong said, while the rest of the space being developed closer to 28th Street S will take another 24 to 36 months.

They figured the Spirit Garden could be a place for the public to gather now, a way to introduce the distillery’s new ambitions to the community. The containers that form the garden already existed on their lot, Armstrong said, and it took the small distillery staff a lot of time and “back-breaking work” to clean and paint them.

“That craft spirit really runs through everything we do,” Armstrong said.

If you go to St. Petersburg Distillery

St. Petersburg Distillery is located at 800 31st St. S. 727-914-0931. The Spirit Garden will be open 5-10 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 5-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday and 5-9 p.m. Sunday. The tasting room is open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and noon-6 p.m. Sunday.