Marker 48 Brewing: Inside Hernando County's First Craft Brewery — and the River Marker Behind the Name
By Hernando Beacon · June 11, 2026 · 4 min read
Drive west on Cortez Boulevard toward the mermaids and you’ll pass a low brick building at 12147 Cortez — Highway 50 — that for years was an auto repair shop. People assume the “48” out front nods to the highway. It doesn’t. The name comes from a channel marker on the Homosassa River, where co-founders Maurice and Tina Ryman keep a fish camp. That mix-up is a good preview of Marker 48 Brewing: a place that looks like one thing and turns out to be deeply, stubbornly local.
Marker 48 opened October 21, 2015, the first full-production craft brewery in Hernando County. Maurice and Tina are Hernando natives and high school sweethearts. Head brewer John Myers is Maurice’s brother-in-law and the original homebrew partner — the guy in the garage before any of this had a tasting room. They gutted a 6,000-square-foot former auto shop and built a brewery inside it. A decade later it’s still pouring.
How it got its name (and why “first” actually matters here)
The river-marker story is the real hook, and it’s easy to miss. Marker 48 sits on the Homosassa River north of Weeki Wachee — a real navigational marker the Rymans pass on the way to their fish camp. The brewery on Hwy 50 borrowed it. The number you see driving past and the number the place is named for are a coincidence.
“First craft brewery in Hernando County” is a claim worth pinning down, because the county has grown a real scene since. When Marker 48 opened in 2015, the local count was zero. Today there’s also Tidal Brewing Company at 14311 Spring Hill Drive — Hernando’s second brewery, started by a science-teacher couple and a partner inside a converted car wash, and named “Best Small Brewery in Florida” in 2020. Two old service buildings, two breweries, a county that went from no craft beer to a small map of it in under a decade. Marker 48 was the one that went first.
The beer — and the one aged 48 feet underwater
Marker 48 runs 25-plus rotating taps plus cider, sangria, and one of the only true barrel-aging cellars in Florida. A few you’ll want to know:
- Mermaid’s Milk Stout — the very first beer the brewery ever tapped, and a nod to the Weeki Wachee mermaids down the road.
- Red, Right, Return Irish Red Ale — took bronze at the 2016 Best Florida Beer competition. (The name is another channel-marker reference — “red right returning” is how boaters keep off the rocks.)
- Olde Homosassa Lager — the easygoing local everyday pour.
- Spring Release — the strange one. This double IPA was aged 48 feet underwater in Weeki Wachee Springs for four weeks, in Early Times whiskey barrels, before bottling. Fewer than 450 bottles existed and they sold out in under a week. It’s the kind of thing only a brewery sitting next to a world-famous spring would even attempt.
If you’re chasing the Spring Release, it’s a small-batch experiment, not a permanent tap — worth asking the bar staff whether another underwater aging is in the works.
Tap for a Cause and the Founding 48 Club
Two things set Marker 48 apart from a standard taproom, and both are about community rather than beer.
The Founding 48 Club was the pre-opening model: supporters contributed labor and backing to help get the brewery built before it ever poured a pint. It’s an unusually hands-on way to launch a business, and it tied the place to its earliest regulars from day one.
Tap for a Cause is Tina Ryman’s ongoing nonprofit beer program — a rotating tap whose proceeds go to a local organization. The Humane Society of the Nature Coast is a documented beneficiary, tied to a Marker 48 Oktoberfest fundraiser. It’s a quiet, recurring way the brewery funnels money back into Hernando groups.
Planning your visit
Current hours, straight from the brewery:
- Wednesday: 12–9 pm
- Thursday: 12–8 pm
- Friday–Saturday: 12–10 pm
- Sunday: 12–6 pm, with brewery tours on Sundays
A few common questions, answered:
- Food? Marker 48 runs on a rotating food-truck model rather than a full kitchen — the lineup changes, so check before you go if you’re counting on dinner.
- Dogs and kids? The brewery has long been known as dog-friendly and family-tolerant; it’s a taproom, so use judgment, but you won’t be the only one with a leash or a stroller.
- Tours? Sundays. Go early in the window if you want one.
- How close is Weeki Wachee Springs State Park? Minutes down Cortez Boulevard — close enough that the Spring Release beer was literally aged in its water. A morning at the springs and an afternoon flight at Marker 48 is an easy Hernando day.
Marker 48 is the brewery that proved Hernando County could grow its own craft scene from nothing. Stop in on a Sunday for a tour, ask which Tap for a Cause is pouring, and toast the channel marker on a river 15 miles north that started the whole thing. If you make it out, tell us what’s on tap — we’re tracking the county’s beer scene as it grows.
