Saltwater Brewery - What's Brewing

Tides & Taps is our weekly read on the ocean, the beer and South Florida — and specifically on the places where a brewery full of anglers and divers can actually be useful.

Ask most people where Florida’s coral reef is, and they will say the Keys. That answer is off by roughly two hundred miles.

The reef does not stop at the Keys

According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida’s Coral Reef stretches more than 350 nautical miles, from the Dry Tortugas all the way north to the St. Lucie Inlet in Martin County. Florida is the only state in the continental U.S. with extensive shallow coral reef formation close to its shoreline.

The northern section — the stretch that runs past Palm Beach County, which is to say past us — is managed as the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Ecosystem Conservation Area. It covers roughly 105 miles of reef, from the northern boundary of Biscayne National Park up to the St. Lucie Inlet. If you have ever launched out of a Palm Beach County inlet with rods in the holders, you have been over it.

Why late August is the tense part of the year

Corals are animals that live in partnership with algae. The algae live inside the coral tissue, photosynthesise, and hand over most of the food the coral needs. That partnership is what builds a reef, and it is temperature-sensitive.

When the water stays too warm for too long, the coral evicts the algae. The tissue goes translucent, the white skeleton shows through, and that is bleaching. A bleached coral is not dead — it is starving. Cool the water down soon enough and it can take the algae back and recover. Leave it too long and it does not.

Heat stress is cumulative, which is why the risk in South Florida builds through the summer and peaks in late August and September. Right now is the pointy end of the year for the reef off our coast. Bleaching is also not the only thing out there: stony coral tissue loss disease first appeared off Florida’s southeast coast in 2014 and the state’s monitoring network added disease observations to its remit in 2016 because of it.

The number that should end the “it’s just coral” argument

People treat reefs as scenery. They are infrastructure. By NOAA’s accounting, the coral reefs of southeast Florida carry an asset value of $8.5 billion, and generate $4.4 billion in local sales, $2 billion in local income, and 70,400 full- and part-time jobs.

Seventy thousand jobs. That is dive shops, charter captains, tackle stores, hotels, restaurants, and a fair number of the people who walk into our taproom on a Saturday. The five counties bordering the reef are home to more than six million people, and the reef is quietly working for all of them — as fish habitat, as a tourism engine, and as the thing that takes the energy out of a swell before it reaches the beach.

What you can actually do this month

Here is the part we care most about, because it costs nothing and almost nobody knows it exists.

Florida DEP runs SEAFAN — the Southeast Florida Action Network — and it takes reports from the general public. Not just scientists. Not just certified surveyors. In the program’s own words: “No special training is needed. If you see something unusual, just report what, when and where the incident was observed.”

So if you are out this month and you see any of that — report it:

• Online: the SEAFAN reef incident reporting form, or the program page at floridadep.gov
• By phone: the SEAFAN hotline, 866-770-SEFL (7335)
• Diving regularly? DEP’s BleachWatch program trains volunteer observers for free, online and in person, in Martin, Palm Beach and Broward counties and south from there. Current conditions reports live on the BleachWatch page.

One thing worth knowing: DEP says reports of the absence of bleaching and disease are as useful as reports of its presence, because that is how a baseline gets built. “I dove Palm Beach County on Sunday and everything looked normal” is real data. Send it.

Three more that take no effort at all:

1. Anchor on sand, never on the reef. Look for a clear sand patch, or pick up a mooring buoy where one is available. An anchor chain dragging across coral does damage that takes decades to grow back.
2. Take out more than you brought. Monofilament and plastic are the two things that most reliably end up wrapped around something living.
3. Give the reef a wide berth in the shallows. Standing on coral to adjust a mask kills it just as dead as an anchor does.

Where we come into it

We are the team behind the edible six-pack ring — packaging designed to break down rather than spend a human lifetime drifting around out there, which was covered by National Geographic and the Palm Beach Post when it launched. You can read more about it on our E6PR page.

But packaging is the easy half. The harder half is that the reef needs people who are already out there — fishing, diving, paddling — to notice things and say something. Our founders started this brewery because they were those people first. The reporting form takes about two minutes, and it works better the more of us use it.

Our beer you can find around South Florida, or at the taproom — we are the first building off the I-95 Atlantic Ave exit, at 1701 W. Atlantic Ave, Delray Beach. Open Monday 1–7, Tuesday through Thursday 12–10, Friday and Saturday 12–11, and Sunday 12–8. If you want to know what else is on around here, the Reef Room events page keeps the calendar.

See something on the reef this month. Report it.