Jacksonville's Kickbacks is a craft beer experience

Kickbacks Gastropub and Goozlepipe & Guttyworks are more than meets the eye.King Street in Jacksonville looks like an unassuming row of restaurants, shops, and nightlife. With a few bars and breweries in the area, the street looks like any other line of places that might have a good beer or two on draft, but it certainly doesn’t look like the home of one of the most unique beer experiences in the Southeastern United States.From the outside, Kickbacks Gastropub seems like a run-of-the-mill bar and restaurant. That façade hides one of Florida’s greatest craft beer experiences.THE FIRST FLOORUpon entering, it’s difficult to miss the giant tower of beer taps in the center of the bar - the first clue that Kickbacks is more than meets the eye. The bar is currently down a few draft lines due to renovations, so they only had 120 taps working instead of the usual 200. The second indicator of Kickbacks extraordinary nature is revealed after a quick look at the draft list. Vintage beers, rare beers, and limited beers all reside on the same draft list. The first five drafts on the tap list on a random Saturday:

1. Ancient City Brewing – St. Augustine Orange Amber
2. New Belgium Brewing – Fat Tire Amber Ale
3. Sierra Nevada Brewing – 2010 Bigfoot Barley Wine
4. Great Divide Brewing – 2010 Old Ruffian Barleywine
5. Brouwerij Corsendonk – 2007 Corsendonk Christmas Ale

Looking deeper into just these five beers:

1. Ancient City is a local brewery, and Orange Amber is a regular beer of theirs. Nice to know Kickbacks supports local breweries.
2. New Belgium’s Fat Tire is a classic. It has recently been reformulated, and Kickbacks has a fresh new keg of it tapped.
3. Sierra Nevada’s beers are regularly available, but not a 13-year-old version of their seasonal American barley wine.
4. Great Divide Brewing pulled their beer out of Florida to focus on territories closer to their Colorado home in 2014. 2014! This means that this keg was likely squirreled away to tap for a special occasion like this random Saturday.
5. Corsendonk Christmas Ale is a classic Christmas beer, but a 16-year-old version? That is unlikely outside of a special event or a vertical tapping. Extremely unusual to have the keg sitting around just to be available.

Interest piqued. Curiosity at full.Above the entrance and off to the side stands small lockers mounted to the wall. 99 of them actually. So, there are 99 bottles of beer on the wall. That’s a nice touch. But these are not random bottles – these are 99 bottles of Samuel Adams Utopias, the every-two-year-release that is a blend of many spirit-barrel-aged beers that retails for $180 per bottle. And there are 99 of them on the wall. There is definitely someone curating this experience and making sure that beer lovers have exceptional selection and experiences. And that was only the first floor.THE CURATORKickbacks is the name of the establishment, but the adjacent dining room is called Goozlepipe and Guttyworks. “This 2-level dining room is known as Goozlepipe & Guttyworks. Some people don’t know us as Kickbacks. They know us as Goozlepipe & Guttyworks. And the opposite is also true. There are a lot of people that only know us as Kickbacks and they don’t know about this dining room. The whole business is Kickbacks and this dining room is Goozlepipe and Guttyworks which is like a steampunk wonderland. The walls are covered with sculptures and art.” For example, one tile contains every watch Steve has ever owned. In another spot, decorative drains are filled with toy marbles abandoned or lost by previous owners in Jacksonville. This level of detail is exhibited throughout the multilevel establishment.Steve Flores owns Kickbacks and Goozelpipe & Guttyworks. We had met briefly before, but Visit Jacksonville was kind enough to put together a new meeting, and he kindly agreed to show me around. I have been in beer cellars before, but my previous experience could not have prepared me for Kickbacks or the Kickbacks cellar experience.THE CELLAR BARUpon descending into the basement, Steve explained the first part – The Belgian bar. Here, below ground, is an homage to Belgian beer. The bar has 20 taps of Belgian beers with authentic tap handles and tap towers from Belgium. The cavernous room feels cozy and intimate, almost like a private speakeasy with secret taps (except anyone can come down here when the section is open and the beer is available to anyone). Steve says he was inspired to build this area by “my love of Belgium and its beers. It deserved its own area, and then as I got into Belgian beer, I got into old beer, and I needed a place to store beer, so I needed a way to monetize the space.” In order to monetize the space, Steve decided to put in the below-ground part of the building, essentially building a cellar/ basement in Florida.Building the cellar itself took multiple years. “This was a whole story. I could write a book about digging underground in Florida, especially in the Jacksonville clay. It really is an unbelievable story, it was harrowing, and people were doing things they weren’t used to doing. Even the auger people – they squeezed us in between jobs. It was going to be a one-week job and they were here for six. It was a mess.”THE BOTTLE/ CAN CELLARMoving on from the Belgian section to the cellar section, through another locked door, there stood the cave of wonders of craft beer. Here Steve had stored rows upon rows, sections upon sections, and shelves upon shelves of craft beer. Old beers. Young beers. Some breweries do not brew anymore. Some have not been around the Florida market for over a decade. Some classics like Cigar City Brewing and Funky Buddha Brewery along with Goose Island Bourbon County Stout, Sierra Nevada Brewing, Great Divide Brewing, and thousands more. There is a section for Belgian sours and lambics. Another room for Trappist Belgian beers. There is another separate room for beers from Sierra Nevada Brewing and another area for Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. All of these are organized by Steve and categorized by his personal sorting system, so he knows where everything is.“Some of the stuff just ended up in the space. I didn’t intend for it to,” insists Steve. “It’s inefficient to leave empty shelf space waiting for the next thing, so I just keep track of where everything is.” Steve says the cellar has been compared to Bern’s Steak House’s wine cellar, but Steve says he knows there’s no comparison. “They call us the Bern’s of beer.” And like Bern’s, Steve knows his bottles and their location. He is also responsible for keeping up Kickbacks’ cellar experience. “There are certain beers that I’ll always overbuy so we never run out,” Steve posits. “Chimay Grande Reserve I overbuy and hide it in all the corners of the cellar so 20-30 years later, there’s plenty. St. Bernardus Abt 12, I like to stock heavily.”How many bottles live in Kickbacks’ cellar? About 75,000 bottles, Steve says.Almost all of these beers can be ordered, a patron just has to ask for the cellar menu. The catch is that the beer must be consumed onsite.Working through the tunnel, at the end of the cellar rests an ornate table with eight chairs, surrounded on all sides by 239 small lockers. Each locker has varying contents from rare beers to common beers to Miller Lite cans or Corona bottles. Each locker is rented by a Kickbacks patron and holds beer for the patron to reserve the table and enjoy with friends in the privacy of the cellar. “The table is reserved only for people who have lockers,” Steve says. “I handle these myself, so nothing gets messed up.” On the table rests a menu of all the beer available in Kickbacks’ cellar, but they don’t need to order beer from the cellar, insists Steve – in fact that cellar menu is available to any Kickbacks customer. “A lot of locker customers are into the beer, some are not, some just think the space is cool.” The lockers have a waiting list of over 100 people, and they’ll wait about a year or longer for a chance at an open locker.Patrons go to great lengths to rent a locker from Kickbacks. Steve talks about some patrons’ dedication to their lockers: “There’s a locker when 6 years ago we were ready to start renting out the lockers, a friend brought him in and he was from Africa. He said he wanted a locker. He gave me money, didn’t put anything in the locker, and has not been back since, but sends money every year.” Steve points out another locker where the owner passed away during COVID, and when the family hosted the wake (at Kickbacks), he asked about the key and if they would return it. “They actually told me they wanted to keep the locker as a memorial, so every year they send me money.” The locker holds an electronic candle and the patron’s picture.How often do people come down to the cellar? “Every night,” Steve asserts. “Some Saturday nights I have to coordinate to get in as many groups as possible. On a given Saturday there might be 3 or 4 reservations stacked from 6pm to 2am.”“99% of our customers don’t know there is a basement,” Steve says. “We don’t advertise it. People advertise it for us. People post about it. I just don’t cram it down people’s throats. A lot of people may come for a party in the Belgian bar. We have 70 people coming tonight. Out of 70 people, 60 of them have never been to the restaurant before or been to the basement before, so that will expose 60 new people to us and what we do down here. Now I promise you one of those people tonight will think this is so cool that they’ll want a locker. I have to tell them I will text them in a year or two. They can get on the list and I will text them when one if available to see if they still want it. Sometimes they’ve moved, but I never get them back.”BACK TO GROUND LEVELOne of the biggest takeaways from the visit changed my entire outlook on aging beer. When asked how cans age compared to bottles, Steve was candid. “I find that cans age just the same as bottles,” he said, wrecking all preconceived notions on the superiority of bottles for aging beer. “In the end, what matters the most on beers that may not have been designed to age, is how healthy is the beer. Does the brewery have a good lab? And so, I have a lot of confidence in the beer. That matters more than anything else.”After looking over how Steve has shaped the Kickbacks experience, the only logical place to go after that was the bar.On second thought Kickbacks, Goozlepipe and Guttyworks – the whole experience isn’t a wonderland as much as it is the Hotel California –easy to check out, to say goodbye, but so difficult to leave.Kickbacks and Goozlepipe & Guttyworks is located on King Street in Jacksonville. The gastropub opens its doors at 7 am every morning and closes at 3 am every night. Transparency note: This article is the result of a press tour through Jacksonville set up by the fine folks at Visit Jacksonville. Beer, brewery, and bar selections were mine and were made independently.