First Magnitude: Behind the Brewery

Christine Denny’s orange-and-blue flannel stuck to the edges of her forearms, soaked from Gainesville’s afternoon Monday shower.

She nudged up the center of her horn-rimmed glasses and said with a smile, “We are Gator-owned, Gator-brewed.”

Denny, a UF alumna and full-time president of First Magnitude Brewing Company, said she and her husband, John, the head brewer, always had one dream.

“We’d always said ‘One day we want to open a brewery’,” she said. “And then our good friends Wells and Meg said if you guys are serious, let’s do this together.”

So, they did.

Three and a half years ago in 2014, the two married couples came together and opened the doors to First Magnitude, a family-friendly, 15-barrel production brewery with a tap room and an outdoor beer garden in the town they call home.

This venture did not come without sacrifice.

Denny said at the time the four co-founders had professional careers and small kids, but they knew together they would make a really great team.

“So, getting into that was a big jump, but it was one that we were really confident, in our skill sets, that we would be able to do,” she said.

Denny said she left her job as the vice president of Normandeau Associates Inc., an environmental science consulting firm, and John retired his role as the assistant director of the Honors Program at UF while their kids Ella and Tyson were still 9 and 5 years old.

“That’s what we did,” she said. “We came together as four friends and opened the brewery, and it’s been fun.”

Coming up on its 10th anniversary, Swamp Head Brewery, the first production brewery in Gainesville, ended up laying a nice path for First Magnitude to follow while getting off the ground, she said.

“They basically opened the door for people to really be excited about other Gainesville breweries,” she said.

In fact, she added, she believes it’s this collaborative spirit that keeps the love for craft beer alive everywhere.

“It’s one of those industries where we understand that everybody rises together,” she said. “So you really want to support each other and encourage each other because the more high-quality craft beer is out there, the better for everybody.”

First Magnitude currently offers five core beers year-round, with several seasonal brews distributed to local restaurants, and a constantly changing ‘pilot batch’ — a home-brewed batch of various beers that usually fill about 18 taps at the brewery.

Therefore, she said the beer list is bound to change even several times during the week.

“Beer is a bit like blues music,” the website says.

John does a lot of the brewing, Denny said. Even so, all of the co-founders share a great love for the art and the science behind craft beer.

Even though beer is always made from the same four ingredients: water, malt, hops and yeast; the combinations are endless, she said.

“It’s a creative process, but it’s also very precise to make good beer,” she said.

At First Magnitude, she said they can create anything from her favorite brew, a hoppy Ursa India Pale Ale, named after the brightest stars in the sky, to something as unique as the banana-flavored Wakulla German-Style Hefeweizen, named after Florida’s largest first magnitude spring.

Reflective of their mission, Denny said the brewery’s motifs, from the names of the beers to even the artwork on the walk, draws attention to the beauty and conservation of Florida’s outdoors.

“The name First Magnitude comes from the fact that this area of Florida has the highest concentration of fresh water springs anywhere on the planet,” she said. “If you look up at the sky at night, the brightest star you see with your eyes is a first magnitude star.”

Denny said when opening, they imagined the brewery as not only a gathering place for the community, but a platform for any charity across Gainesville to promote their cause while they promote theirs.

She scrolled through her candy-color spotted Google calendar, booked tight with events Tuesday through Sunday from all sorts of groups across Gainesville.

One of her favorite events happened last Saturday, she said.

The fourth anniversary of the Clean Creek Revival had 100 volunteers spend their Saturday morning picking up 6,590 pounds of trash out from creeks in the local neighborhood.

“That’s what’s sitting in that dumpster out front,” she said.

The group then came back to First Magnitude for an afternoon of celebration and continued to raise funds for other local causes.

“That’s core to what we want to be doing; we want to be engaging people in community initiatives and also connecting people with the springs,” she said.

Located just south of Depot Park at 1220 SE Veitch St., First Magnitude Brewing Company creates delicious beer while giving back to the community.