Fort Myers Brewing is honoring the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Ian with its Sips of Support fundraiser on Thursday, Sept. 28 from 2 to 10 p.m.
A portion of sales from every drink purchased will benefit the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association’s (FRLA) Disaster Relief Fund, which helps restaurants and lodging establishments to recover, repair and re-open. It also supports employees who are distressed or need financial support after Hurricane Ian. More than $280,000 in relief funds have already been distributed across Southwest Florida by the FRLA over the last year.
“Even though a year has passed since Ian, there is still so much support needed for the local business community as businesses continue to reopen their doors, get back to full capacity and recover financially. While navigating impacts in our own business to overcome significant loss in distribution, we continue to empathize with everyone in the Southwest Florida hospitality industry who has faced such greater devastation or total loss,” said Jen Whyte, founder and owner of Fort Myers Brewing. “Southwest Florida needs a beer, and we want to encourage our community to come together and lend a helping hand to support the many restaurants, travel destinations and people who make our region a special place to call home.”
The Sips of Support fundraiser event, which falls on National Drink Beer Day, will feature local eats from several food trucks including Farmers Corn, Mobstah Lobstah, Smokin’ Crow’s BBQ and Vesuvius Wood Fired Pizza. There will also be live music from Soapy Tuna at 7 p.m.
This fundraiser is another way that Fort Myers Brewing is giving back to the community after the storm. Just three days after Hurricane Ian, Rob Whyte, the owner of Fort Myers Brewing, turned the brewery’s food truck into a mobile laundromat and spent months on the road doing laundry for people in the hardest-hit communities. The brewery also held a musician benefit and collected donations for local musicians who suffered significant or total loss and launched its Beer-It-Forward program to provide more than 200 beers to local emergency and relief workers who were helping the region recover after the storm.
