Crooked Can surprises Minneola with Florida’s biggest brewery venue opening

Crooked Can Brewing Company opened its Minneola venue on July 15 with only hours of notice, revealing a sprawling beer-and-entertainment complex at Hills City Center that instantly changed the scale of brewery development in Lake County. The site spans 42,950 square feet, close enough to 43,000 square feet that local descriptions have treated it as Florida’s biggest brewery venue opening.

The project sits inside Hills City Center, a 96-acre mixed-use development in Minneola, and the numbers around it show why this is more than a standard taproom buildout. Developer materials for the broader site list 1,039 multi-family units, 600,000 square feet of retail, hotel, senior living and dining space, and 500,000 square feet of medical office space. Crooked Can’s new home is part of that larger mix, giving the brewery a place in a district built to draw traffic from morning through night.

The Minneola venue is also built like a food hall, not a simple bar. The site includes 11 food vendors and a 1-acre beer garden, a format that pushes the business well beyond draft beer sales. That approach matters in a market where breweries are increasingly leaning on full-day destination traffic, family groups and mixed-use entertainment to support revenue instead of relying only on pint pours and weekend taproom crowds.

Crooked Can had already described the Minneola project as a destination brewery and headquarters, and the scale fits the company’s path from its original home inside Plant Street Market in Winter Garden. The new venue carries that market-style identity into a much larger footprint, one that gives the brewery more room for food service, gathering space and event-driven traffic. A July 2025 plan for the project called for a building approaching four times the size of Crooked Can’s Winter Garden home, making the leap into Minneola an obvious growth move rather than a side expansion.

The surprise rollout added another layer to the opening. Crooked Can’s public post set the opening time at 6 p.m. on July 15, and the South Lake Chamber of Commerce got a sneak preview before the doors opened to the public. That kind of short-notice debut can create instant momentum, and in this case it put the focus on the venue itself: a massive, entertainment-heavy beer business built to become a regional stop as much as a neighborhood hangout.