MIAGuide
The Best Miami Breweries With Great Food
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Much like finding decent parking on the beach or your dream of owning a home any time soon, gone are the days of breweries and beer bars serving up a bowl of stale pretzels. In fact, for the past few years, these places have consistently been home to some of the best food in Miami, either through their own kitchens, rotating pop-ups, or food trucks with cult followings. This guide has our favorite breweries, microbreweries, and beer bars with the best food options—because you’re gonna need something to wash down that IPA you try so hard to like.
THE SPOTS
photo credit: Tripping Animals
Nearly all breweries are industrial chic with wide open floor plans, but only one has a giant mural of a stoned chihuahua. Fittingly, it’s named Tripping Animals. The Doral warehouse fills up on weekdays around 4pm—the start of Happy Hour—and is an exciting place to be especially on ”creative Mondays”, when they give everyone paint and canvases and let you relive your elementary school days (except with beer). Obviously you’re here for the enormous selection of beers, but you should also come for the food. Trippy Kitchen, as they call it, has a menu that feels like it was designed by a pregnant woman with spontaneous cravings. There’s ribeye with curly fries, ceviche, a Venezuelan hot dog, and a charcuterie board. It’s exactly where you want to be after a tough (or relatively easy) day at work.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
At first glance, Off Site looks like a small, chill bar perfect for a beer and a conversation—which it is. But the really remarkable thing about the Little River nano-brewery is the food. They have a small menu with recognizable things like a burger, Cuban sandwich, hot dog, wings, and fried chicken sandwich. It seems like normal bar food, but each dish is outrageously good and among the best versions of these very popular foods you’ll find anywhere in Miami. It makes Off Site feel like a museum dedicated to classic finger food.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
The weekly food schedule at Wynwood’s J Wakefield is more stacked than the VIP list at a Bad Bunny concert. The laidback Star Wars and Marvel-themed brewery hosts some of the city’s best pop-ups, which rotate often but include names like Wolf of Tacos and Ted’s Burgers. Their Instagram is your best bet for finding out who will be there and when. The outdoor picnic tables are perfect for enjoying a smash burger and a very Miami-named beer while that one friend goes on about how, actually, Darth Vader was really just misunderstood.
Cerveceria La Tropical has something more valuable in Wynwood these days than a rented Bugatti: space. The huge indoor/outdoor brewery has its own kitchen too, which makes this place feel like a proper restaurant. The menu is mostly Cuban/Caribbean dishes like jerk chicken, churrasco, and pulled pork penne. The bar bites are great as well, like the housemade plantain chips with black bean hummus and the very aesthetic beer can bread.
photo credit: Courtesy Strange Beast
Batman and Robin, traffic and the Palmetto, the Dolphins and not making (or losing in the first round of) the playoffs—some things just go together. And Strange Beast takes the iconic duo of pizza and beer and does it justice. The West Kendall brewery is out of the way for most tourists, so it’s got a genuine neighborhood feel to it. Their seasonal pies are great, although you can always rely on menu staples like the Incan, which is loaded with lomo saltado. And if you happen to be closer to Palmetto Bay than West Kendall, check out their sister restaurant, Maxwell Bros., another spot that nails the pizza/beer combination.
photo credit: Javier Perez
Hialeah is known for many things, and Unbranded should definitely be one of them. The big, spacious brewery sits in the middle of the warehouse district. While they occasionally host pop-ups from brewery favorites like Ted’s Burgers and Luna Rossa Cucina, they’ve also got their very own smokehouse on site. From Wednesday to Sunday, Unbranded Smokehouse serves up tender brisket on nachos, in a quesadilla or taco, as a slider, or just on a big platter. They’ve also got wings and burgers (including a plant-based option).
The kitchen at this Doral brewery is run by Masa Craft, which serves a Cuban/Filipino menu. And it's their croquetas that are the stars of the show, having won quite a few of Miami’s many croqueta awards (yes, Miami has multiple awards dedicated to croquetas). Other hits included their housemade queso, fried chicken sandwich, and spicy guava wings, all of which are just perfect day-drinking meals.
photo credit: CLEVELAND JENNINGS / @EATTHECANVASLLC
Some of the most interesting beers in Miami are being made at this brewery on Bird Road, right next to Tropical Park. Unseen Creatures says they brew with locally foraged yeast and bacteria and while we can’t quite explain what that means, we can tell you the resulting beers are delicious. And they have a kitchen that makes a small menu of snacks, burgers, sandwiches, wings, and ribs. We also really like their simple brewery, which is bright and sunny during the day, with some window seating facing I-95 so you can watch less fortunate Miamians battle traffic while you sip away.
