by | October 21, 2026
Pop Tops & Persimmon Hollow Brewing Company
With every pour, Persimmon Hollow Brewing Company is honoring DeLand’s lost harvest.
The cream-and-emerald brick facade of Persimmon Hollow Brewing Company, situated along West Georgia Avenue in DeLand, is stitched into historic downtown with strings of white lights crisscrossed over the narrow brick street. Sunlight cuts through tall factory windows where the building’s former life as a midcentury Western Auto shop lingers, its floor still marked in faint yellow paint.
Like the space it occupies, the company’s name is an ode to the past. Long before citrus groves defined Central Florida, persimmon trees, with leaves seasonally matching their fruits’ burnt-orange color, blanketed the town once known as Persimmon Hollow. The Florida-native fruit, harvested in autumn, vanished from prominence once settlers arrived in present-day DeLand in 1876 in pursuit of orange gold. “[The brewery] does help to tell part of that story and advocate for more discovery of our heritage,” says Sarah Finch, the executive director of the West Volusia Historical Society.
Learn how to make a Harvest Hippie Spritz.
That ethos of marrying preservation and creation is brewed directly into its products. Two of its four heavy-lifting beers—Beach Hippie IPA and Daytona Dirty Blonde Ale—were inspired by a mother-daughter duo from West Volusia who were friends of the brewery. The Beach Hippie is even adorned with a rendering of a vintage blue-and-white Volkswagen van the mother lived in during the ’70s and ’80s. “It’s an appeal to that romantic kind of beachy bum fantasy that we’ve all had,” says Mike Brooks, the brewery’s director of sales and marketing.
It’s an appeal to that romantic kind of beachy bum fantasy that we’ve all had.
-Mike Brooks
Beach Hippie, the most requested drink at the bar, accounts for more than 60% of Persimmon Hollow’s total revenue and is commonly referred to as “the beer that built the brewery.” The East Coast-style IPA with 7.1% alcohol by volume (ABV) is a fruit-forward brew with a malt backbone, just balanced enough to satisfy both connoisseurs and newbies alike. Dirty Blonde, its golden, crushable companion, is sweeter on the tongue and lighter on the stomach. “It’s a beer I’m going to crack four or five open during the day,” Brooks says.
Perhaps the brewery honors the Old Florida town most by shaping its next chapter. Since its founding in 2014, it has helped usher in the city’s downtown revival, holding court with other trendy revamps in town over the last decade. On any given afternoon, laughter from families celebrating milestones or friends playing bingo echoes beneath the exposed wooden rafters that once sheltered cars, layering new memories into the history already held by its walls. “We’re a part of the community, and we want the community to be a part of us,” Brooks says.
