Every craft brewery has an origin story, but few start as small as Alga Beer Company’s: one gallon of beer, brewed on a kitchen stove in a college apartment, poured for skeptical friends at parties. A decade later, the brewery that grew out of those test batches sits in Pensacola’s East Hill neighborhood with a national medal on its shelf, a resident food truck, and a reputation as the closest brewery to the beach-bound airport crowd.
Two Friends, a Stove, and a Growing Urge
Brett Reid and Thomas Grier met as students at the University of Alabama, introduced through Thomas’s childhood friend Kayla — who is now Brett’s wife. “In college, we started drinking a lot of beer and decided we wanted to make our own,” Brett says. The first batches were a single gallon on the apartment stove; the batch size climbed to five gallons, then ten, with the co-founders hauling homebrew to friends’ parties to test recipes and build their skills. “When we realized it didn’t suck,” Brett says, “we thought we might go into the brewing business.”
After college, from 2013 to 2017, real life intervened — Brett worked at Mountain High Outfitters in Birmingham and Thomas at AT&T in Atlanta — but the brewery idea never left. The question was where. Atlanta and Birmingham’s craft markets were already crowded; Pensacola, remarkably, still had only two craft breweries at the time. Research with help from the Brewers Association, the trade group for independent craft brewers, confirmed the gap.
Building a Brewery During a Pandemic
Brett and Kayla moved to Pensacola in 2017, and Brett took a working stint at Pensacola Bay Brewery to learn the industry from the inside. The hard lesson came fast: “We were kind of slapped in the face with the cost of getting a brewery up and running,” he says. It took until March 2020 — the worst possible month to start anything in hospitality — to find the right property, a former restaurant called Brew-Haha in the East Hill neighborhood. They signed the lease that July, with the pandemic raging.
The renovation was a masterclass in sweat equity. The couple did much of the work themselves alongside the contractors they hired, and when the brewing equipment arrived from China on an 18-wheeler, the windows had to come out of the building to get it inside. “The US doesn’t produce stainless steel anymore,” Brett notes. “It’s either China or Canada.”
Alga Beer Company opened in August 2021. The name is a mashup of the founders’ states during the planning years — Alabama and Georgia. By the time the doors opened, Pensacola’s craft scene had grown to fourteen breweries, which is both a tribute to the market’s growth and a measure of how much the two founders beat the odds by arriving when they did.
Medals in Year One
The tap list runs at least ten beers deep, anchored by three core beers and a rotation of house-developed recipes built with brewing software, plus collaborations with other brewers. The awards came fast. In Florida competition, Alga’s beers earned Best American Lager and third-best honey beer in the state. At the U.S. Open Beer Championship — one of the country’s major professional brewing competitions, judged blind alongside thousands of entries — Alga took a silver medal for its dark lager, the Solitude Black Lager, in a field stacked with established national winners. Three medals in the first year put the young brewery on the map well beyond Pensacola.
Eight of the brewery’s beers are available in crowlers — 25.4-ounce cans filled and sealed from the tap — alongside the T-shirts and hats that every self-respecting tap room stocks.
A Place for Everyone
What makes Alga worth a visit, though, is the room itself. “We pride ourselves on being a place for everyone,” Brett says — a claim the programming backs up. Tuesday trivia and Thursday bingo anchor the weekly calendar; a monthly drag show reflects an explicitly all-inclusive ethic; and the music booking leans original — no cover bands, with local and regional acts most weekends and a monthly Saturday DJ night called Club Alga. Among the acts the stage has hosted is Americana singer-songwriter Drayton Farley, who went on to sign a Nashville recording contract and open for Willie Nelson.
The Brown Bagger food truck is parked permanently on the property, covering the food side of the equation, and the location does quiet work of its own: East Hill is the closest brewery to Pensacola International Airport, and travelers google “brewery” after landing and stop in with luggage in tow on the way to the beach.
Still in Its Own Lane
Asked how the partnership works after a decade of brewing together, Brett keeps it simple. “We work well together. The biggest part is we have a good team and we let people do what they are good at. Everyone has their own lane. It takes two paddles to make a canoe work!”
That lane-running ethos — three core beers done well, a room designed for everyone, and a business built one referral at a time in a neighborhood rather than an entertainment district — is a fair description of what East Hill craft brewing looks like when it’s done right. A kitchen-stove experiment that didn’t suck has turned into one of the panhandle’s most decorated small breweries, and the rotation keeps turning.