What started as two guys and a micro-brewery in an Odessa industrial park has grown into a beer-making enterprise that is now looking for a home about half the size of Walmart.
Big Storm Brewing Co. is just two years old, and already the company is pushing out 5,000 barrels of beer annually, and it hasn’t even started to offer Big Storm in cans yet.
“I never thought when we started that we would ever need anything more than this little shop,” Mike Bishop, Big Storm’s co-founder and head brewer, told reporter Michael Hinman. “We just thought we would make boutique beers, and make enough to pay the bills and give us a little money on the side. But that was not our destiny. People just wanted our beers.”
Big Storm has just expanded into South Florida, and is about to make its debut in bars in and around Orlando. Read the complete story in this week’s The Laker/Lutz News.
Reporter B.C. Manion got a good look at how far model train builders are willing to go with their creations during a recent visit to the Suncoast Center for Fine Scale Modeling.
As part of her regular Worth the Trip series, B.C. visited the Odessa center and had a chance to talk to the model-makers that turn these railroad dreams into a scale-model reality.
“There’s so many things in here for you to see,” said Dale MacKeown, a member of the Sundance Central team. “People who come in here typically spend two, two-and-a-half hours. We have people who come in here every time.”
Finally Philip Gans has a story that few are left to share about a terrible time in human history: the Holocaust.
“Your children will never have a chance to see a concentration camp survivor,” Gans told students at Land O’ Lakes High School.
The 86-year-old was forced to flee their home in Amsterdam when he was young, and avoided detection for more than a year before Nazi soldiers finally caught up to his family in 1943 when Gans was just 15.
His number, 139755, is still tattooed on his arm, being kept at Auschwitz III. But Gans considers himself one of the few lucky ones to come out of there.
“I survived,” he said. “There were many people who did not survive. My dad, for instance, he was the only (one) of the 21 members of his family that did not die in the gas chmabers. He died in a death march April 1945, a month before the liberation.”
All of these stories and more are in this week’s The Laker/Lutz News, available in newsstands throughout east and central Pasco County as well as northern Hillsborough County. Find out what has your community talking this week by getting your local news straight from the only source you need.
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