JACKSONVILLE, FL. Back in April, state inspectors walked into Wicked Barley Brewing Co. on Baymeadows Road and found enough to shut it down on the spot. The emergency closure order, issued April 17, 2026, cited roach activity inside the brewery and restaurant. The facility was ordered vacated by April 18.
It was not the first time inspectors had forced the doors closed.
What Inspectors Found
Wicked Barley Brewing Co. — Recent Inspection Record
The April 17 inspection produced six high-severity violations and four intermediate violations. That is the heaviest single-visit toll the facility has logged in its recent documented history.
Among the violations recorded that day was one that goes beyond pest activity: an employee not reporting symptoms of illness. State inspectors flagged it as a high-severity violation.
The roach activity was the stated trigger for the closure order. The illness-reporting violation sat alongside it in the same inspection report.
What These Violations Mean
Roach activity in a food service environment is treated as an immediate public health threat for a specific reason. Cockroaches travel between sewage, garbage, and food preparation surfaces, carrying bacteria including salmonella and E. coli. When inspectors document live roach activity in a licensed restaurant, state rules allow for an emergency closure without warning because the contamination risk is present and ongoing, not theoretical.
The illness-reporting violation is a separate category of danger. When a food worker fails to report symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, or jaundice to a person in charge, that worker can continue handling food and serving customers while actively infectious. Norovirus, one of the most common causes of foodborne illness outbreaks, spreads through exactly this route. A single sick employee working a full shift can expose dozens of customers.
The combination documented on April 17 at Wicked Barley, active pest contamination and a breakdown in the illness-reporting system, represents two distinct failure points in the same facility on the same day.
The follow-up inspection on April 18 found one remaining high-severity violation. The brewery was cleared to reopen at 8:37 a.m. that morning.
The Longer Record
The April closure did not arrive without warning signs in the record. Across 32 inspections on file, Wicked Barley Brewing Co. has accumulated 199 total violations. That works out to an average of more than six violations per inspection visit.
High-severity violations have appeared in nearly every recent inspection. The August 2025 visit produced three high-severity and five intermediate violations. February 2026, roughly ten weeks before the closure, produced two high-severity violations. The pattern across 2024 and 2025 shows no extended stretch where the facility posted a clean or near-clean report.
The April 2026 closure was the second emergency shutdown in the facility's documented history. State records do not show the circumstances of the first closure, but its existence means that April's shutdown was not an isolated event in an otherwise stable record. It was a recurrence.
The October 2024 inspections are worth noting specifically. On October 22, inspectors conducted two visits. The first found zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations. A second inspection the same day found two high-severity and one intermediate violation. That sequence, a clean report followed hours later by a report with serious violations, suggests the facility's condition on any given day was not consistent.
After the Closure
Wicked Barley Brewing Co. was back open by the morning of April 18, less than 24 hours after the closure order was issued. The follow-up inspection that cleared it for reopening still documented one unresolved high-severity violation.
That violation was not identified in the available closure records as a roach-related finding. The single remaining high-severity citation logged on April 18 was the employee illness-reporting failure first documented the day before.
The brewery has now been emergency-closed twice in its inspection history, has 199 violations across 32 inspections on file, and was cleared to reopen on April 18 with at least one high-severity violation still on the books.