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Building a Brewtal new festival

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You’ll know when Meg Evans or James Evans is mashing in — the music inside their respective breweries is loud, fast and hard.

Meg — the head brewer at Homestead’s Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery — and James — a brewer at Bethel Park’s Spoonwood Brewing — aren’t alone. It’s not uncommon to hear metal pumping in the back rooms of breweries around Pittsburgh, and that got Meg and James thinking about a new festival that pairs the city’s craft beer with some of its heaviest bands.

And that’s where the Pittsburgh Brewtal Beer Fest came from. Starting at 2 p.m on Nov. 6 at Spirit in Lawrenceville, there will be six bands and beer from Rock Bottom, Spoonwood, Penn Brewery and East End Brewing — including four one-time beers created exclusively for the event.

There is other swag available too, for those who lend a little extra financial support through the event’s Kickstarter page, a step Meg and James took to help ensure financial success in Brewtal’s first year. The stuff — both breweries and bands pitched in — is available at several levels to those who kick in by the Oct. 4 deadline.

Both James and Meg have plenty of experience with working beer events, but both say starting a festival from scratch is a whole different experience: finding a venue, taking care of the intricate legalities, setting up suppliers and getting the word out. The good part? After the word got out, cooperation from bands and breweries was immediate and enthusiastic.

“There’s still a lot to do, but it’s shaping up really to be really awesome,” Meg Evans said this week. “Everyone is going to have a blast.”

Category: Allegheny County, Region | Tags: , ,

A trip to the North Country

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It’s hard to think of Bob McCafferty running an empire of any kind — he smiles and laughs too easily.

But Bob and Jodi McCafferty are more than a decade into North Country Brewing, a craft beer business that started as a brewpub in an old Slippery Rock mortuary. It now includes a production brewery that distributes to three states and a second brewpub at the site of what was Butler County’s first craft beer bar.

The canning operation began a few years ago, when it became apparent that there was a market for the brewery’s well-established staples: Buck Snort Stout, Slimy Pebble Pils or Station 33 Firehouse Red, for example. That’s proved to be a smart move. Sales in Pennsylvania have been solid enough that North Country also started sending beer to Florida, where Western Pennsylvania expats and snowbirds have made it popular. And the brewery recently expanded its distribution area to include eastern Ohio.

The most recent change didn’t come from the business plan. When the Harmony Inn began serving better beer in the mid-1980s, it didn’t take long for the McCaffertys to become regulars. And when they needed money — and time — so they could begin renovations of the Slippery Rock property that would become the original North Country, they both took jobs at the Inn.

So when that business was teetering on the brink a few years ago, the McCaffertys stepped in; they bought the building in 2013, remodeled it inside and out and opened it again a year later. It has the similar feel to the version of the Inn Bob McCafferty loved 30 years ago, and the North Country updates — including Big Rail Brewing, a nano brewery in the basement serving both as an incubator and as a provider of house beers — don’t disrupt that vibe. It’s a restoration that feels like it could hang on for another century.

If Mr. McCafferty is an emperor, he’s a benevolent one. And his empire is doing all of us some good.

Category: Butler County | Tags: , ,

East End finds a new home in the Strip

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When the original Pittsburgh Public Market opened in the Smallman Street produce terminal in 2010, East End Brewing was there. And when the market moved to a larger space on Penn Avenue three years later, East End went along for the ride.

But even before that iteration of the market shut down earlier this year, East End’s Scott Smith had started to poke around the Strip District for a space better suited to what his presence in the market had become. Originally conceived as a spot to fill growlers with fresh East End beer, the Penn Avenue version became a de facto taproom, especially once the state’s rules governing breweries and retail sales of pints changed a couple years ago. On weekends in particular, the corner of the market occupied by the “growler shop” turned into something that looked an awful lot like a bar.

“It was a great spot to fill growlers,” Mr. Smith said of the Penn Avenue spot. “It wasn’t a great taproom.”

With the move to 102 19th St., Mr. Smith has a great tap room. East End is one of three Pittsburgh Public Market expats to occupy the building — Jonathan Moran Woodworks and The Olive Tap are the others — and it looks at home in the warm space with its brick, wood … and the hop-cone lights hanging over the bar. It’s easy to get excited about the potential for the space, too — there’s a 6,000 square-foot plaza behind the tap room that can host food purveyors, artists and events once it’s done.

And let’s not forget the beer. East End’s space was home to another bar in a previous life, and Mr. Smith said he hoped that the leftover tap system would be sufficient for his needs. That wasn’t the case, which meant building an entirely new system for the tap room. That system includes 11 taps and a nitro line, but there is also a full line of canned and bottled East End liquids, as well as a crowler machine that Mr. Smith said has already been busy. Want food? Customers have the entire Strip to choose from, as the new taproom is BYOF.

Moving twice couldn’t have been easy. But from my side of the bar at least, it looks like it will be worth it.

Post-Gazette coverage of East End Brewing’s Taproom in the Strip:

Category: Pittsburgh | Tags: ,

Getting bigger but thinking small at Rivertowne

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I recall my first visit to Rivertowne Pour House in Monroeville about a decade ago; I was impressed that they were able to keep 18 taps pouring their own beer, brewed on a small, in-house system.

The hard work it took to keep all that beer flowing back then was a precursor to Rivertowne Brewing’s position now: distributing its staples in six states while still being nimble enough to experiment … and come up with great results.

The growth that came with the startup of its production brewery in Murrysville — Rivertowne sells beer in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina and Florida, where the brand is especially popular in Bradenton, the spring home of the Pirates — has given brewmaster Andrew Maxwell, who gave up a job as a chemist with a pharmaceutical company to follow his passion for brewing, a chance to continue tinkering while maintaining an almost-obsessive watch over the liquids he’s in charge of making; talk to Mr. Maxwell for 30 minutes, and the words “quality control” will come up at least a half-dozen times.

Much of the tinkering comes on the system in the Monroeville Pour House, which Mr. Maxwell said has practically become an extension of his body. Need an amber that features honey and chamomile? That’s where it would start. Turning a one-off pineapple beer into a year-round sensation? Here’s a spoiler for a bonus video to be released next week: it happened in Monroeville as well.

Rivertowne grew up in Pittsburgh, and even as the brand has grown, Mr. Maxwell and founder Christian Fyke still acknowledge the brewery’s roots. Rivertowne’s annual Rhythm and Brews party is scheduled for Aug. 27 at Tall Trees Amphitheater in Monroeville. Proceeds raised from the event will result in a hefty donation to local charities; the brewery’s other annual events — haunted brewery tours in October, the Hibernation party in January and the Jahla party in April all do the same.

You can now find Rivertowne beers in five other states. You can drink Old Wylie’s IPA in the the Hall of Fame Club at PNC Park. But you can still find the experiments of Mr. Maxwell and the other staff brewers at Rivertowne’s four restaurants or at its brewery tap room — it will never be too big for that.

Category: Allegheny County, Region, Westmoreland County | Tags: , ,

Five years, dozens of beers — that’s Beer Week

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When you reach a five-year milestone, it feels right to take a moment and reflect on the path that got you there. And if you think back to the first Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week — especially if you do so right after completing the fifth — you’ll understand just how far the industry has come in that time.

Were there a dozen Pittsburgh-area craft breweries back then? And will there be three or four times that many by the end of 2016?

As we learned last week, it’s not just the number that should leave an impression. It’s the quality of the beer as well. Just look at this year’s collaboration beers: breweries that haven’t yet opened or got started in the last six months contributed to five of the seven official collaborations, and all were excellent.

Summarizing my beer week is always a tough task. But let’s give it a try.

Favorite events: I made a point to try to get to some new stuff (to me, anyway), and I liked everything I got to. A standout was Oysterfest, the annual party under the Homestead Grays Bridge put on by Blue Dust — and I’m not even a fan of oysters, although the festival’s namesakes drew huge lines all afternoon. The beer choices were unique — don’t pass up a chance to try stuff from Shawnee Craft Brewing as it shows up around here, boys and girls — and there were plenty of food trucks for those who didn’t want oysters. I was also pleasantly surprised by the Summer Craft Brewhaha, a summer seasonal preview held at Altar Bar; the selection was far from predictable and the space worked out better than I expected. I hit some staples as well: the annual Wednesday beer breakfast at Piper’s Pub featured an extra delicious menu this year, perhaps in celebration of its spot on the calendar (April 20, ahem); the Helltown Brewing cask takeover at Piper’s, this year with beef braised in the brewery’s Mischievous Brown Ale as the dinner special; and if I can help it, I will never miss an edition of the Brewers’ Olympics, the event at Grist House that puts a perfect cap on the week.

Favorite beers: Here’s a great sign — the collaboration beers are more consistently good every year. With one slightly embarrassing caveat — that this North Side resident never got a taste of the Mash Paddle vs. Hipster India Red Lager collab from Penn, Spring Hill, War Streets and Allegheny City — I’ll say that the standout among the collaborations was Greenfield Bridge is Falling Down, the deliciously juicy Vermont-style IPA from Spoonwood, Helltown and two newcomers: Helicon and Dancing Gnome. I loved all of the other collaborations, but I have to give specific mention to one more, mostly because I made such a big deal about it in my beer week previews: white stouts — like Prospero, from Rock Bottom, Hitchhiker, Bloom Brew and and Eleventh Hour — work wonderfully, even if one’s brain can’t figure out in advance how a white stout might work. A few others: I really liked 5 Point Black IPA, the collaboration between Carson Street Deli and Rock Bottom; Big Boots Gose, a margarita-esque effort from the women of Pittsburgh’s Pink Boots Society; and as it starts to get warmer, be on the lookout for Grapefruit Chinookee IPA from Full Pint — it was a standout at the summer festival.

Category: Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week, Region | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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