Filing pints and cups: Magnanimous Brewing and Magnanimous Coffee combine forces
A PARTNERSHIP THAT FILLS CUPS AND GLASSES – Magnanimous Coffee and Magnanimous Brewing
(This text is adapted and expanded from a conversation with Magnanimous Brewing co-founder Charlie Meers on the BeerWise Podcast. Click here to listen to the original podcast.)
Magnanimous Coffee Sign posted outside Magnanimous Brewing
For one of Tampa Bay’s youngest craft breweries, Magnanimous Brewing, the coffee service of Magnanimous Coffee allows the brewery a reason to open at 7am every morning of the week. (*The City of Tampa in 2021 rescinded a decades-long ban on Sunday morning alcohol sales, which allowed for Sunday morning sales.) “Being lucky enough to work with great breweries in my past career, I got to go to different places and see how things are done differently around the country and around the world,” says Magnanimous co-owner and co-founder Charlie Meers. “I have been to places that have the coffee shop and brewery aspect together, and I have always enjoyed that. Coffee people, beer people, and food people, they’re all in the same realm, and [joining the coffee to the brewery] has just always made sense to me.”
For Charlie and Magnanimous, the intersection of coffee, food, and craft beer was a natural one that helped everyone involved. “We’re paying rent on this building 24 hours a day, why don’t we do coffee here as well?” The brewery formed a partnership with an existing coffee roaster, Ginger Beard Coffee, and branded the operation as “Magnanimous Coffee powered by Ginger Beard Coffee.” This symbiotic relationship within the brewery allows the coffee roaster to open service and retail in a location separate from their existing footprint, and also allows the brewery to serve a customer who may come in for coffee and leave with beer.
Magnanimous Coffee founder Derek and Magnanimous Brewing brewer Eric
The addition of coffee also opened Magnanimous Brewing to a new kind of customer – the graveyard shift. The brewery stands two miles away from Tampa General Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in the city. “People work third shift and overnights, and they want to enjoy a beer” Charlie asserts. “It’s kind of nice if you’re getting done at the hospital and you can grab a pint and then people will grab their four-packs on the way out of town.”
“It helps the coffee guys because people will come in a grab a coffee, but they’ll also grab beer. I think it’s a really nice combo for everyone.”
About Magnanimous Brewing
Magnanimous Brewing was founded from the collected experience of a few veterans of the Tampa Bay and U.S. craft beer scene who had a vision to open their own brewery and spread the idea of being great both in beer and to people. From their brewery in the Tampa Heights neighborhood, the crew at Magnanimous Brewing strive to fulfill their mantra in beer and in life: “Be Magnanimous.”
“Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.”- Van Wyck Brooks.
