BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- The growing number of Birmingham beer hounds making the drive to his store in Atlanta was enough to convince Kraig Torres that he could do well here.

So Hop City Craft Beer & Wine is putting the final touches on a deal expected to put it in a 5,500 square-foot storefront in Pepper Place.

The store, which is popular among beer lovers in Atlanta, stocks about 1,700 different kinds of beer ranging in price from rock-bottom up to $50 a bottle. Ninety percent of its wines sell for less than $25 a bottle.

In an interview this week Torres said he's got no personal connection to Birmingham. He just kept seeing Alabama driver licenses at his register.

"We have a large customer base from Birmingham who drive two-and-half hours to our store," he said. "I thought it was a good opportunity."

It will be the second store for Torres, who opened Atlanta's Hop City in 2009, when he got out of the auto body repair business to try to turn his craft beer hobby into a career.

About 68 percent of the revenue at the Atlanta store comes from beer sales, 12 percent from wine and the rest from home brewing equipment and supplies, he said. His research indicates that Birmingham is short on wine shops, so he expects to sell a higher proportion of wine here.

He hopes to open at Pepper Place, near Bettola and the Cantina, in late March.

Birmingham beer lovers can thank 2009's Gourmet Beer Bill, which made high-gravity beer legal here, for their new choices, Torres said.

"With the change in the laws ... we find it to be an attractive market," he said. "We would not have done it before the law changed."

This item appeared in The Insider, a weekly column in The Birmingham News.