It’s Bash At The Brew night, and patron Ronald Rico sips guava wheat ale while watching his favorite wrestler, Domino, take a thunderous suplex in the ring, so loud it rattles the glass where the taproom’s fermentation tanks are kept.
But Domino, a 6-foot brawler in lime-green tights to match his dyed ponytail, isn’t about to concede the fight yet. With a chorus of drinkers at Miami’s The Tank Brewing Co. chanting “Cafecito! Cafecito!” in unison, Domino surges to his feet, caffeinated by crowd energy and hopping mad like he’s ready to punch the moon. He launches into a flurry of right hooks and chest chops before lining up his opponent for the finishing move — a powerslam called the Double Nine — and the three-count win.
Rico, his wife Michele and daughter Mia burst from their chairs and cheer as Domino flexes his arms, each sleeved in tattoos of dominoes, palm trees and a Cuban cafetera with biceps.
“He represents the [Cuban] culture,” says Ronald Rico, of Kendall, taking a gulp of ale. “He’s the man. He talks to everyone after the shows. Really generous guy.”
Bash At The Brew, hosted the first Saturday of every month at The Tank, is one of four shows thrown at Florida breweries by Pompano Beach-based, pro-wrestling company Coastal Championship Wrestling (CCW).
Here — with stainless-steel kegs nearby and bartenders pouring pilsners and pale ales under market lights and beach balls — wrestlers launch off the top rope in raucous displays of acrobatics. The rowdiest fans hug metal guardrails separating the ring from the taproom, sporting merch with the night’s advertised talent — a “DOMINO” tee in Miami hot-pink, a Cha Cha Charlie sombrero — letting even casual visitors clock the crowd favorites.
If you ask the breweries and CCW co-owner Nelio Cuomo Costa, it’s an alcohol-fueled marriage that works. Taproom sales surge when CCW shows up, letting patrons witness professional wrestling with larger-than-life characters and gimmicks synonymous with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Meanwhile, CCW leverages these inviting venues to sustain its loyal following.
“A brewery’s demographic and CCW’s demographic are the same, if you think about it,” Costa says. “There’s a cool microbrewery culture full of fans out there who don’t watch wrestling anymore. So they’ll have a beer, and they discover this tight CCW show that won’t insult their intelligence, where the wrestlers work their butts off, and there’s 300 crazy fans beside them.”
CCW shows adopt different names based on the brewery. Tripping Animals Brewing in Doral, for example, throws monthly Rumble In The Jungle events out of an air-conditionless brewhouse, a space that’s “loud and nutty and hot,” Costa adds, packing in 200 fans so close it’s “a—- and elbows.” Other brewhouse brawls happen at Magnanimous Brewing in Tampa (Havoc And Haze) and Walking Tree Brewery in Vero Beach (Rooted In Chaos), often drawing 300 to 500 visitors, CCW co-owner Dan Ackerman says. (There are also non-brewery shows, including at a Port St. Lucie amphitheater, a bar in Kissimmee, and even in Las Vegas.)
“Less people are going out and drinking beer overall, so we’ve become more important to [breweries] based on the fact that we’ll draw people to the venue,” Ackerman says.
Cristian Gaier, assistant taproom manager at The Tank, agrees that wrestling and brewing communities “feed both ways,” which is especially vital now that South Florida’s golden age of craft-beer dominance has declined in recent years as people drink less or choose alternative beverages.
“People come here hearing about the wrestling and find the beer, or they come for the beer and find a freaking wrestling ring in the middle of the taproom,” Gaier says. “[CCW] brings in awesome crowds. We know we’re going to hit our sales mark because they show up, and they make the local beer community bigger.”
The man most responsible for tag-teaming wrestling with SoFlo breweries is Domino, real name Adrian Castro. The wrestling fan says his “first and lasting childhood memory” was renting the same “WrestleMania X” VHS tape at Blockbuster over and over to watch an iconic ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon.
After graduating from Florida International University with a human resources degree, Castro worked in HR management at a job that “hurt my soul.” When his friend David Rodriguez opened Union Beer Store in Little Havana in 2017, Castro became its marketing manager, and started replaying old matches and pay-per-view shows on repeat at the craft-beer bar.
Then Castro costumed as a “Scarface”-style character named Manolo to plug the bar on Instagram and put up action figures of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. It didn’t scratch his wrestling itch enough, he recalls. So he jumped into the ring as an “extra” for the first of many crossover events between CCW and the former Unbranded Brewing Co. in Hialeah. He loved it so much he became a pro wrestler in January 2023.
“I wanted to tear myself out of my comfort zone,” says Castro, 38. “I wasn’t getting any younger and didn’t want to look back with regret. It was about a fulfillment of my passion as a kid.”
Castro has bled for the sport under his Domino moniker, and describes his Cuban-inspired tattoos as a “roadmap of Miami.” As president of Miami Beer Week, Castro has also helped create collab brews with CCW (like Triple Chokeslam, an IPA, and Bash At The Brew), a light lager) and land events at Unbranded and later The Tank and Tripping Animals.
Costa, who’s run CCW since 2018, says keeping South Floridians’ attention spans at breweries is tough, which is why matches are shorter and packed with sex appeal and storylines that crescendo into explosive moments — sometimes unintentional, like the time Domino went viral for getting hot cafecito tossed in his face.
The moment was scripted — a wrestler hurled the trayful of cups — but the aftermath wasn’t, Costa says.
“The real moment was that nobody told Domino’s father,” Costa says. “He jumps into the ring and starts fighting the wrestler. And we go over to Domino and we’re like, ‘How do we calm down your dad?’ So yeah, it was awesome.”