Walk into Tripping Animals Brewing Co. on a Thursday evening and you will hear the room before you fully take it in. The music sits under the conversation, the bar stays three people deep once happy hour hits, and the whole place looks like someone handed a cartoonist a brewery budget and said to go a little feral with the wall space. That is more or less the point. This is a South Florida craft brewery that started as a garage hobby in Venezuela, opened its Doral production home in 2018, and has since leaned hard into art, loud flavors, and a kitchen that measures up with the beer.
Tripping Animals Brewing taproom. Photo: Tripping Animals Brewing.
Garage beer in Caracas, then a move to Miami
On its About page, Tripping Animals dates the whole story to 2011, when the future founders were brewing in a garage in Caracas and trying whatever ideas they could get their hands on. Miami New Times reported that Daniel Chocron and Juan Torres had previously launched the nano-brewery Casa Coronarías in Venezuela in 2012, and that the wider team began plotting a stateside brewery after early experiments and competition experience abroad. By the time the group announced plans for Doral, local coverage described head brewer Daniel Chocron alongside partners Ignacio Montenegro, Iker Elorriaga, and Juan Torres, with Montenegro bringing experience from Missouri’s craft scene after college in St. Louis and work that included time at O’Fallon Brewery in Maryland Heights.
The brewery’s own About page names Daniel Chocron, Ignacio Montenegro, Iker Elorriaga, and Juan-Manuel Torres as the four founders who formally founded Tripping Animals Brewing Company in Doral in 2018 after years of travel, recipe work, and looking for the right home base in South Florida. That version of the story is straightforward and a little romantic in the way brewery origin stories often are, and it matches what you sense when you stand at the bar and watch the staff talk about batches like they still cannot believe this is the day job.
The name, the building, and the feeling of the room
Miami New Times explained the name as a nod to wildlife native to Florida and Latin America, with illustrated animals meant to send drinkers on a kind of flavor trip tied to different places and ideas. The branding lands visually the second you see the tap handles and glassware. Thrillist’s roundup of Miami breweries described the artwork as part of the draw, with a big industrial space that feels closer to a theme park queue than a quiet tasting room. Mariana Trabanino’s piece for The Infatuation opened with the kind of detail you only get in person, calling out a giant mural of a stoned chihuahua and arguing that the room is an easy mix-up with a standard warehouse brewery until you actually look at the walls.
When the Doral location was still under construction, Miami New Times noted a roughly fifteen-thousand-square-foot industrial build-out with a roughly twenty-four-hundred-square-foot taproom, a fifteen-barrel brewhouse, twenty draft lines, and plans for arcade games and lounge seating alongside a bar pouring house beer plus guest beer, wine, cider, and sangria. Today’s public-facing pages describe a similar split between production and hospitality, with the taproom page now listing nineteen draft lines, wines, seltzers, cocktails, and Trippy Kitchen food, plus a patio the site calls the Animal’s Roots and Rock Garden where dogs are welcome when leashed and behaved.
Brewery production floor. Photo: Tripping Animals Brewing.
Happy hour runs Monday through Friday from 4pm to 7pm in Doral with discounted drafts and a food special on tequeños, which is exactly the kind of detail that explains why the room fills quickly after work. The same page that lists hours also answers the practical questions people actually ask in the car on the way over, including where to park for free, the fact that the team fills thirty-two-ounce crowlers rather than outside growlers, and the reminder that kids are welcome until 8pm with close supervision because the building is still a working brewery.
Beer that chases whatever is exciting this month
Chocron told Miami New Times before opening that he planned to lean on hop-forward styles, IPAs and stouts, and easier-drinking lagers and pilsners while the team figured out what people kept ordering. The preview piece also highlighted a Belgian dubbel called Wild Duck that took second place at the U.S. Open Beer Championship in both 2016 and 2017, which matters because it shows how long these recipes existed before the taproom walls went up. Thrillist later summed up the tap list by saying the sours often steal the show, with rotating releases that can drink like fruit-forward smoothies, while IPA fans still find plenty to chase.
If you pull up the live Doral tap list on the brewery website on any random night, you might see hazy IPAs like Ever Haze, Mexican-style lagers under the No Mames line including a lighter No Mames Light variant, fruited sours, imperial stouts, and high-ABV hazy experiments with names that sound like inside jokes shared across the bar. The point is rotation. Tripping Animals built its reputation on constant new releases and bold flavors, not on asking you to memorize a single flagship and call it a day.
Bar and draft taps. Photo: Tripping Animals Brewing.
Trippy Kitchen and the case for staying for dinner
The menu has changed shape since the earliest previews. Miami New Times once described plans for snack plates, tacos, and steamed bao tied to a Poke Kai collaboration. The current operation centers on Trippy Kitchen at Doral, and The Infatuation’s late-2025 review treats the food as a full partner to the beer rather than a concession stand afterthought, calling out dishes like tuna tiradito, corvina ceviche, a churrasco parrillada platter, a straightforward cheeseburger that nails the basics, and pork belly chicharrón with salsa criolla. That review also captures the weekly Monday creative session with paint and canvases, which sounds silly on paper and then makes perfect sense when you remember how much of this brand is visual.
When the food is this intentional, ordering another round feels less like stalling for time and more like staying through the part of the evening where the beer and the plate finally make sense together.
Oakland Park and the second taproom
The company’s About page and homepage both describe community ties across Doral, Oakland Park, Fort Lauderdale, and greater Miami. The Oakland Park taproom page lays out a second public face at 3555 Dixie Highway with a large outdoor beer garden, about ten rotating beer drafts, wine, and a sandwich-and-hot-dog menu from chef Estefania Andrade. Hours there differ from Doral, including closure on Mondays in the schedule shown on the site, with Tuesday through Thursday hours running 4pm to 11pm, Friday and Saturday noon to midnight, Sunday noon to 8pm, and a Tuesday-through-Friday happy hour block in the afternoons that mirrors the spirit of the Doral specials.
If Doral is the production heart and the louder weekend scene, Oakland Park reads in copy like a neighborhood beer garden built for steady weeknight hangs and live events, which rounds out the same brand without cloning the exact same room twice.
Growth, distribution, and the part you see in stores
A December 2025 company release distributed via PR Newswire framed Tripping Animals as still growing in a tough national beer market, citing expanded retail placement including Whole Foods Market locations in the Southeast, Sprouts Farmers Market, Trader Joe’s, Milam’s, Fresh Market, and additional accounts, alongside seasonal presence tied to Halloween programming at major Florida theme parks. The same release described packaging refreshes for core brands like Ever Haze and No Mames in twelve-ounce formats, the expansion of No Mames Light as a lighter lager option, and investments in an in-house lab for quality control and product development.
You can ignore most of the business headlines and still have a great night out in Doral, though the same restlessness shows up when you notice how tightly the merch table, the grocery shelf, and the taproom feel connected.
Founding team. Photo: Tripping Animals Brewing.
What people say when they write it down
Trabanino’s Infatuation piece already covered the happy-hour energy and the food-versus-beer balance, and Thrillist’s brewery guide adds the shorthand that sours are often the stars, which lines up with how many guests still talk about the fruited and mixed-culture side of the menu years into the run.
User-written reviews add texture without turning the piece into a star-rating spreadsheet. On Foodeist, which aggregates visitor comments, an October 2018 post under the name rskinslaxer7 called the beers “incredible,” singled out the sours, and praised a laid-back room with a staff that sounded both knowledgeable and personal. An earlier Foodeist review from Enrique Sanchez described walking in for the first time and getting “immediately charmed,” with shout-outs for friendly staff, food, and what was then a standout Hefeweizen. Greg Whitaker, also on Foodeist, summed the vibe as “artsy, industrial, hipster, and laid-back,” which is a fair plain-language read of a space that could easily tip into chaos if the service were less organized.
None of that replaces your own visit, but it does track with what the brewery says about itself on paper, which is that the taproom should feel like a creative hangout first and a production facility second.
Practical stuff
The Doral brewery and tasting room sits at 2685 NW 105th Avenue in the Arts District corridor that Miami often files under “west of the airport, worth the drive.” Phone contact is listed as (305) 646-1339. The taproom hours published on the brewery site run Monday through Wednesday 4pm to 11pm, Thursday and Friday 4pm to 1am, Saturday noon to 1am, and Sunday noon to 8pm. Parking is free on site, and the taproom FAQ explicitly warns against using certain neighboring lots where towing is a risk, which is the kind of detail you appreciate before you lock the car. Reservations options appear on the main site for anyone planning larger groups or events.
Oakland Park lists (954) 982-2101 and first-come seating, with the outdoor garden acting as the dog-friendly zone described on the location page.
Bottom line
Tripping Animals Brewing Co. is what happens when a group of friends treat beer like a moving target instead of a finished sculpture. The Doral room is big, loud, and deliberately weird in the best way, the tap list rewards people who like variety, and the kitchen under Trippy Kitchen asks you to stay long enough to make a meal of it. There is a second taproom in Oakland Park for Broward County regulars, and the brand keeps showing up farther afield in coolers and grocery aisles as the team chases new recipes and new formats. If you like craft beer that acts like it still has something to prove, this is one Miami-area stop where the building, the menu, and the label art all tell the same story.
Sources
About Us. Tripping Animals Brewing. https://trippinganimals.com/about/ (Accessed April 2026).
Doral Brewery | Tripping Animals. Tripping Animals Brewing. https://trippinganimals.com/location/taproom/ (Accessed April 2026).
Oakland Park Taproom | Tripping Animals. Tripping Animals Brewing. https://trippinganimals.com/location/oakland-park-taproom/ (Accessed April 2026).
Danna, Nicole. “Tripping Animals Brewing Opening in Doral.” Miami New Times. 2018. https://www.miaminewtimes.com/restaurants/tripping-animals-brewing-opening-in-doral-10878077 (Accessed April 2026).
Trabanino, Mariana. “Tripping Animals Brewing Co.” The Infatuation Miami. December 22, 2025. https://theinfatuation.com/miami/reviews/tripping-animals-brewing-co (Accessed April 2026).
Tripping Animals Brewing Continues to Grow Amid Industry Changes. PR Newswire. December 22, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tripping-animals-brewing-continues-to-grow-amid-industry-changes-302648054.html (Accessed April 2026).
The 16 Best Breweries in Miami. Thrillist. September 23, 2022. https://www.thrillist.com/drink/miami/best-miami-breweries (venue page: https://www.thrillist.com/venues/tripping-animals-brewing-co-5049803) (Accessed April 2026).
Tripping Animals Brewing. Foodeist. https://foodeist.com/place/tripping-animals-brewing (Accessed April 2026).