Some beer is brewed to be sold. Marker 48 is brewed to be belonged to — poured in a dog-friendly garden on Florida's Nature Coast, from water drawn out of the same aquifer where the mermaids swim.
A name pulled from the water
On the rivers and channels of Florida's Gulf coast, numbered markers guide boaters safely home. Marker 48 takes its name from that world of buoys and channel markers — a nautical nod to the waterways that define the Nature Coast, the stretch of Hernando and Citrus counties known as the land of mermaids. The brewery leans into that identity proudly, calling itself the only brewery in the country that draws its water from the same source where the mermaids live: the spring-fed aquifer beneath Weeki Wachee.
That sense of place is not a marketing slogan bolted on after the fact. It is the whole point. The beer tastes like where it comes from because it is, quite literally, made of the place it comes from.
Built by hand, and by a hundred hands
Marker 48 was founded by Maurice and Tina Ryman, high school sweethearts and Hernando County natives who spent years touring craft breweries by RV before deciding to build one of their own. They converted a former mechanic's shop on Cortez Boulevard in Brooksville, with Maurice's brother-in-law John Myers stepping in as head brewer.
Rather than chase investors, the Rymans invented the Founding 48 Club: a beer a day for life in exchange for forty hours of hard labor building the place out. More than seventy people showed up to swing hammers. As Maurice tells it, he pulled up one morning to find forty people already waiting, ready to work. A brewery raised that way is not really a business. It is a neighborhood that happens to make beer.
The taproom and the town
Today the taproom is an easygoing beer garden with an Airstream-style walk-up bar, cornhole, shade overhead and dogs underfoot. One release, a double IPA called Spring Release, is aged forty-eight feet underwater in Weeki Wachee Springs — a stunt only this brewery, in this place, could pull off.
The community role runs deeper than the pint. Through its Tap for a Cause program, Marker 48 brews specialty beers in partnership with local nonprofits, steering the proceeds toward organizations working on causes that include mental health and community welfare. It is a brewery that understands a taproom can be a gathering place with a purpose.
Standing with Responders First
That same instinct — to make a place where people are cared for — is what draws Marker 48 to Responders First. The brewery stands behind our free five-day wellness program for first responders, military, veterans and their families, adding its name and its heart to the work of helping the people who run toward danger find their footing again.
For a brewery built by a community that showed up ready to work, supporting the responders who answer that call is simply an extension of who they already are. We are honored to have them in our corner.