Brewer sailboats for sale

Buying a used Brewer: a designer's name across several yards

A "make: Brewer" listing doesn't identify a single shipbuilding company the way most brand names do. Ted Brewer's own site credits more than twenty separate production builders with boats built to his designs, and no company called Brewer is among them; the name on a used listing is the designer's, not the yard's. That matters practically: Ted Brewer's own site also notes that builders sometimes made design changes without consulting him, so two boats carrying the same designer's name can differ in ways the name won't tell you. Reading a Brewer listing well starts with asking which yard actually built the hull.

Which builder and era to target

The name itself traces to a falling-out. Fort Myers Yacht and Shipbuilding had built Ted Brewer's Whitby 42 design under license from the Canadian yard; once the two were no longer on good terms, Fort Myers began selling its own version as the Brewer 42, and hull number is the practical way to tell the two apart -- Whitby reserved numbers 1 through 199 for its own boats, leaving 200 and up to Fort Myers. The Fort Myers version isn't just a rename: it carries a revised keel with a skeg-mounted rudder, nicknamed the "Brewer bite," plus 500 additional pounds of lead ballast for a 9,000-pound total at the same 23,500-pound displacement as the original. That lineage continued as the Brewer 12.8, built from 1983, and the Brewer 44, introduced in 1987 and built until 1990 -- the 44's extra length is a swim platform added onto the 12.8's own hull mold, not a longer hull. A separate builder question applies to the Oceanic line: Pan Oceanic Marine built the Oceanic 43 and 46 in Taiwan from 1980 through 1982 before the operation moved to the Philippines, after which the Taiwan yard, Mao Ta Yacht, resumed building off the repaired 46 mold under two further names -- worth knowing since a boat advertised as a Seastar 460 or a Mao Ta 46 is the same design.

What to inspect across the range

Construction detail is grounded mainly in the Fort Myers-built 12.8 and 44. Practical Sailor described a hand-laid hull cored in balsa through the topsides and a hull-to-deck joint that bolts and beds two overlapping flanges together under a teak cap -- points worth a surveyor's attention on any older hull. The same review found the standard chainplates and shrouds light for serious offshore work, suggesting 3/8-inch chainplate material and at least 5/16-inch shrouds with a 3/8-inch headstay rather than the boats' standard rigging, and flagged narrow side decks, with the shroud chainplates landing in the middle of the walking path rather than outboard of it -- worth seeing in person rather than judging from photos. Separately, Cruising World reported a deck issue on one owner's new Brewer 44.

Navigating the lineup

Beyond the Fort Myers-built 12.8 and 44, a used Brewer search can turn up boats from other yards entirely: the Mariner 47, built by Mariner and praised by Ted Brewer himself as heavy and solidly built; and the Oceanic 46, whose Taiwan-built hulls also circulated under the Seastar and Mao Ta names. No 55-foot Oceanic was ever produced, despite an early Brewer sketch for one, so a listing claiming that size is worth a second look. Use the full model directory on this page to sort a listing into its actual builder and generation rather than relying on the Brewer name alone.