How The Bog came to be, the magic of yeast and a little day-drinking
Written and Photographed by Chloee Blair
beer at noon
The Bog means beer to a lot of people.
And it’s damn good beer, perfected, almost obsessively, by owner Steve Mendoza, the dude you’ll see through the big windows grinding away every morning beneath string lights and a copper-clad brewhouse.
People come from all over for Steve’s drafts - from the citrusy, top-selling West King Haze IPA to his signature Smoked Datil Ale, a light beer with a smooth, smoky-heat finish. They come for his shirts and glassware, too, which feature that frothy, Florida-shaped logo.
But The Bog is something else for me.
It’s my place.
I have my spot – a tiny table in the corner by the big window where I can prop my feet up on a chair, work on my laptop and drink in the middle of the day.
I only realize during my interviews with Steve and his wife, Stacy, that I have committed a bit of a faux pas by having only tried the cider - decidedly not a beer and one of the only drinks on tap that hasn’t been brewed by Steve.
I confess this during my sit-down with him out on the back patio one morning.
“I feel like I’ve succeeded though,” Steve says. “I would see you working here, not even drinking my beer, and from my perspective, that means I’ve created a space people want to come to because it works…the ambience is right.”
Steve’s right. This place is perfect.
The exposed brick, the big brewing tanks close enough to touch, the storefront windows giving view to King Street’s busy-ness - the vibe is just plain good. Even the music - usually some kind of rock or old-school hip hop, not too indie, not too hard - feels right.
Stacy points out no less than three or four dudes - owners of local breweries and bars - who come into The Bog during our interview to hang out, talk, drink beer. She compares the place to Cheers.
“People here have become lifelong friends,” Stacy says.
Although she covers marketing for the brewery, Steve - the sole brewer - runs the place, working seven days a week.
“Beer doesn’t stop,” Steve says, emphasizing he’s hyper-focused on fermentation.
“Brewing is yielding the power of yeast to do what you want it to do,” he says, explaining that alcohol is a byproduct of “yeast just being itself.”
“One of the things I take pride in here is my consistency. Like, cream ale tastes like cream ale every time I put it on draft. You can only do that if you hit [certain fermentation goalposts] perfectly,” Steve says.
But he emphasizes his skills are “night and day” from when he first started brewing, saying he was forced to rapidly improve.
“That’s one of the things that’s worked out well. My brewhouse is a little small for how much volume we do now but, because I have to brew so often, it’s fast-forwarded me through trial and error,” Steve says.
He made his first beer back in college - a German wheat beer called Hefeweizen.
“It was just me and my roommates, who also own a brewery at this point,” Steve says. “We were underage, so we found a way around that.”
The home brew shop where they bought their kits and ingredients loved it.
“They thought it was hilarious,” he says.
Steve and a friend wrote up their first brewery-based business plan at 21.
“We gave it to this sandwich shop where we were working at the time. We tried to put a brewery in there and they thought we were crazy.”
Brewing took a backseat while he pursued a journalism major in Tallahassee, where he met Stacy, a fellow journalism student. After graduating, they straddled the country – from Florida to D.C. to Asheville – before finally settling in St. Augustine.
Despite getting a Masters in Journalism, he ditched it.
“D.C. ruined it for me - going into the fire and seeing what it’s like day-to-day. I never wanted to do politics,” Steve states. “I always just wanted to write for a fishing magazine. That was my goal. Just write about fishing.”
“I still could, but…if I have free time from [The Bog] it’s spent with the family. Or fishing. And sometimes I get to combine both of those and it’s really special.”
Steve says he’s always had an entrepreneurial spirit, so when craft beer was “blowing up,” he didn’t hesitate.
“People were opening up craft breweries in the craziest, weirdest, cheapest, scariest part of town all across the country,” Steve says. “So we thought – if they can do it, we can do it.”
“When we found this building, we were all in - we pushed all of our cards into the center of the table,” Steve says
Once a soda shop and later a pawn shop, 218 W. King was in rough shape.
“The gentleman who sold us the building, he saw the twinkle in our eye,” Steve recounts. “As rundown as it was, we didn’t see it [that way] - we saw it as the greatest place. We love this spot.”
Steve spent 13 months gutting and renovating the building, ripping out old horsehair plaster and lathe to expose the brick beneath with the help of his father and brother, who commuted to aid in the effort.
“I had to get a job as a manager at Panera because I ran out of money,” Steve says, laughing.
Stacy also pitched in while job-hunting, chiseling mortar from the walls between interviews.
“My hands were all busted,” Stacy recalls. “I felt like Scarlett O’Hara who doesn’t want anyone to know she picks cotton, so I was like, I can’t let anyone see my hands. I was applying at these corporate places in downtown Jacksonville,” and she laughs as she covers her hands.
The Bog opened in March 2016 with just a handful of beers on draft.
“I think maybe 10 or 15 people came in all day,” Stacy recounts, saying it was “a little bit of a slow start.”
Not long after opening, Steve recalls a conversation with a grocery store cashier, who liked his Bog shirt. He encouraged her to check out the brewery.
“She was super excited,” and asked where it was located, Steve recalls, so he told her it was on West King.
“She stopped me dead in my tracks and goes ‘I don’t go to West King,’” Steve recounts. “And I just very curtly said - I guess we’re not going to see ya.”
Steve says he didn’t know there was stigma associated with West King until then. After having lived in D.C., and traveling to Philadelphia and Baltimore, “this paled in comparison,” Steve says.
Since then, Steve says he’s worked to improve the location “little by little.” The back area, now a pergola-covered patio with tables and a toy-filled turf area for kids, began as a patch of sand.
Steve said he enjoys working with his hands, and built most of the patio in 2020 during the COVID-19 shutdown. Tacos My Blessing - a food truck with possibly the best shrimp tacos anywhere, beer-battered with The Bog’s ale - has been nested behind the brewery since 2020.
Steve says he remains focused solely on selling his beer in-house due, in part, to the state’s strict three-tier wholesale system, which prevents him from selling his beer directly to local bars, like Muggsy’s across the street.
“I think that’s why this model still works, where you’re just a local watering hole with good beer,” Steve says. "It all starts with good beer.”
“My original idea was always to have a neighborhood joint that was friendly - good service, good beers, no extra frills. Just – if you like beer, we have beer. We have good beer. We make it here. There’s the guy that made it. He’s mopping the floors now because he’s done finally.”
The Bog will be celebrating its 10-year anniversary next month with an all-day party, vertical tastings, experimental barrel-aged beers and other unique flavors.
Find out more about the celebration, their full tap list, hours and more on The Bog’s site or Insta.
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