cooking with beer • homebrewing • upcoming beer events • style profile • have you tried...
table of contents editor’s notes upcoming events pittsburgh brewers guild style profile - trappist beers handcrafted - brewing up history won't you be my neighbor strange brew chioda's bayernhof museum
hoppy couple - elwood's pub
pin pals - pittsburgh libations week plates & pints - gaucho abandoned pairings
business of beer have you tried ... brewer sit-down - paul schneider cooking with beer - chicken hunter's stew home brewing - belgian dubbel what’s brewing? - new beers resolution
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CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
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January 4
January february
Craft Pittsburgh is issued bi-monthly by P•Scout Media, LLC for readers of legal drinking age. All information and materials in this magazine, individually and collectively, are provided for informational purposes. The contents of this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of P•Scout Media, LLC., nor does the mention of trade names or commercial products constitute endorsement or recommendation for use. No portion of this magazine may be reproduced in whole or part without expressed written permission from the publisher. Advertisements are subject to the approval of P•Scout Media, LLC. P•Scout Media, LLC. reserves the right to reject or omit any advertisement at any time for any reason. Advertisers assume responsibility and complete liability for all content in their ads.
editor’s notes
BOWLING, BEER AND BUILD-OUTS
• Congratulations to our former Homebrew writer Brian Reed on earning the title of Master Cicerone. While more than 94,000 have passed the first-level Cicerone exam known as Certified Beer Server, only Brian and 15 others have earned the Master Cicerone title—the fourth and top level of the program. Started in 2007, the Cicerone Certification Program tests and certifies beer expertise similar to wine’s Master Sommelier program. The exam includes six hours of written essay questions, two hours of oral examination from industry experts and two hours of tasting and evaluation of over 40 different beers. There have been 169 exam attempts with only 16 passing scores. • Cheers to our friends at CoStar brewing and their plans for a new brewery in Etna. Their goal is to start construction on the new brew pub in April and open by the fourth quarter of 2018. • I’m pumped to finally collaborate with @kristen_in_pgh this issue, one of my favorite Instagramers. Kristen is a talented, local photographer and urban explorer that documents our abandoned and forgotten spaces. I pitched the idea of a photo shoot pairing breweries with abandoned spaces in their neighborhoods and she was all about it. Check out her amazing work on page 38. • House of 1,000 Beers has broken ground and started construction on their new Wexford location. Follow them on Facebook for updates. • Places that have opened since the last issue. -Cinderlands Beer Co. - Voodoo Brewery, Grove City - Caliente Pizza & Draft House, Aspinwall
CELEBRATing our 25th year in southside ORIGINAL SMOKED WINGS • SALADS HEADWICHES • MUNCHIES • BURGERS GROWLERS • 42 BEERS ON TAP 4, 6, 12 PACKS AND FOOD TO GO!
NEWLY REMODELED
• Also new this issue, Tom Marshell's “PinPals”. What started as an obscure Simpson’s reference and an excuse to bowl has escalated pretty quickly. Tom has great ideas on where this can go and we’re all really excited about it. • Brandon McCarthy, former head brewer at Rock Bottom, has returned to Western, PA accepting the brewer position at Brixton Brewing at Hollywood Gardens in Rochester, Beaver County. We’re looking forward to drinking Brandon’s beer again. Cheers,
1805 E. CARSON STREET • SOUTHSIDE PITTSBURGH, PA 15203 • 412.431.7433 Rob Soltis
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PIT TSBURGH
Trax Farms Tickets go on sale January 2nd
WINTER BEER FEST IVAL For more details call 412-835-3246 or visit our website www.traxfarms.com
upcoming events
January • 12 Art on Tap @ The Westmoreland Museum of American Art • 17 Nugget Nectar Day 2018 @ Piper’s Pub • 19 T roegs Nugget Nectar First Squeeze PGH & print signing with Lizzee Solomon @ Spirit
• 19 8th Annual Pour for a Cure @ US Steel Tower • 19 +21 Night: Science After Dark @ Carnegie Science Center • 20 Make Your Own Kombucha @ Tupelo Honey Teas • 20 Good Wood Barrel-Aged Beer Fest @ East End Brewing • 20 Phil-A-Palooza: Groundhog Phil @ Threadbare Cider • 20 Punxsutawney Phil at the brewery @ Penn Brewery • 22 Moos and Brews Pairing Class @ Hitchhiker, Sharpsburg • 27 Winter Beer Festival @ Trax Farms • 27 Hibernation Party 2018 @ Rivertowne Brewing
February • 3 3rd Annual Imbibe North Side @ Mattress Factory • 13 Black Tie Formal 2018 @ Brew Gentlemen • 17 Penn Brew U 101 @ Penn Brewery • 18 3rd Annual Fermentation Fest @ Spirit • 22 Cat Cafe @ Threadbare Cider • 10 The Dude Imbibes Bowling Tournament @ Crafton Lanes • 23-24 Pittsburgh Winter Beerfest @ Convenstion Center • 10 R hapsody in Brew, Homebrew Competition, Benefitting the Edgewood Symphony @ The Union Project
March • 3 Hell with the Lid Off 14 @ Kelly's Bar & Lounge • 24 Mammoth Beer Mile & 5K @ Westmoreland Fair Grounds
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
April
6
April 20th - 29th
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CraftPittsburgh.com
Words Brian Conway
Brewers Guild
The future of independent craft beer in Pittsburgh has its roots in Philadelphia. It's 2016, and Grist House's Brian Eaton, Hitchhiker's Andy Kwiatkowski, East End's Scott Smith and Eleventh Hour's Matt McMahon are in Philadelphia for the Brewers Association's Craft Brewers Conference. It's the biggest conference of its kind – the type of event that inspires big ideas and an eye toward the future. One night, huddled over a few post-convention beers at Monk's Cafe, the conversation turns to collaboration: if Pittsburgh is going to break out and become a nationally recognized destination for craft beer, Pittsburgh's breweries would need to advocate with a unified voice. There was plenty of precedent: craft beer meccas like Asheville and San Diego have their own guild or brewers alliance, and Pittsburgh had at least one a century ago: The Independent in Squirrel Hill takes its name from a pre-prohibition alliance of local breweries. But who among Pittsburgh craft brewers today, already juggling new taprooms and canning lines and dozens of new brews, would have time to take the lead?
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
So the idea sat, maturing like a heady stout, until a prod came along from a natural ally: visitPITTSBURGH, the official tourism promotion agency for Allegheny County.
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As it turns out, visitPITTSBURGH had reached out to members of Brew: the Museum of Beer, to discuss the creation of an “ale trail” guide to local breweries: something that could be used regionally to market Pittsburgh as a craft beer destination and raise its stature nationally.
visitPITTSBURGH to promote it. And so, 28 local craft breweries joined to create the Pittsburgh Brewers Guild. “VisitPITTSBURGH is looking forward to working with the Pittsburgh Brewers Guild in promoting our craft breweries,” adds VisitPITTSBURGH's chief marketing officer, Tom Loftus. “The more there is to do, the more people will want to visit and see all of what we have. The more people we can attract, the greater impact we can have on the economy.” “With 30+ breweries in Allegheny County, it was about time that we had an official organization that would represent the interest of the breweries in Allegheny County,” says Eaton, chairman of the guild. He is joined by Vice-Chairman Matt McMahon, of Eleventh Hour; Treasurer Tom Schneider, of Grist House, Secretary Andy Kwiatkowski, of Hitchhiker, and three members-at-large. Breweries pay $200 a year to join and each brewery gets a vote in matters before the guild. As 501(c)(6) trade organization, Eaton says they can't directly lobby; however, as a united front, they will be able to discuss and set policy goals and educate lawmakers and others on issues important to them. For example, there has been talk among politicians of upping the drink tax to 10%, a move, Eaton says, that could hurt up-and-coming breweries disproportionately as they rely heavily on draft sales in early years for solvency. One of the guild's very first acts was to apply for a $30,000 grant from the The PA Malt Beverage Promotion Board to help fund the creation of the ale trail guide, which would be distributed online as well as in print form regionally.
“We have a lot of great beer being produced [in Pittsburgh],” says Eaton. “Just a little promotion outside the city goes a long way.”
Eaton says that these types of guides, produced by local breweries, have been effectively by other cities to boost tourism, something that benefits all 28 breweries in the guild.
After some initial communication, representatives of 23 local brewers met with the agency in-person at Grist House and expressed their desire to spearhead the creation of such a guide, and work with
“Personally, I'm super proud that we’re doing this,” says Kwiatkowski. “It speaks volumes to how tight we are as a community, and how focused and ready we are to grow together as a city.”
PASSION runs in the family
Hops are not just hops and coffee isn't just coffee. We've sought out creative and passionate coffee roasters from around the country to explore the innovative flavors of the coffee they roast. Each release is unique and showcases a different coffee.
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SALT LAKE CITY, UT - DENVER, CO
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style profile Words Brian Meyer
THE
HOLY HISTORY OF TRAPPIST BEERS T
ypically each issue I cover the history and details behind a specific style of beer, hence the column name, Style Profile. This issue however, the topic in question isn’t a categorical style at all, but rather more of a genre of beer. Instead of specific cues like those found in stouts, IPAs, or wheat beers, Trappist beers are more about where and how they’re brewed and less about what their specific taste and flavor characteristics are.
1. The beer must be produced within the walls of the monastery.
What is a Trappist?
3. The profits are primarily intended to provide for the needs of
When it comes to defining a Trappist beer however, there’s more than a little bit of confusion on the matter, and for good reason. It’s quite common to hear the terms Trappist, Abbey, and Belgian all used to describe or name a beer, and while these designations often overlap, they all have a unique meaning. Starting with the broadest of these, let’s take a quick look at what it takes to make a beer earn the designation of Belgian. As you can probably guess, for a beer to be called Belgian, it has to come from, you guessed it, Belgium. As Brooklyn Brewery’s own Garret Oliver said, “Belgium is to beer what Cuba is to cigars.”
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
In short, for a beer to be officially called Trappist, it must meet three specific criteria. Those are:
There are a few general style similarities that all Trappist beers share, but before getting into that, it’s worth taking a look at the history of these monastic beers and how they came into being. Let’s start off with an easy one. The word Trappist refers to a branch of the Cistercian Order, a monastic community of both monks and nuns which are referred to Trappists and Trappistines, respectively. In other words, a Trappist is a monk.
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So what is a Trappist beer then, if not solely Belgian? With all this vagueness, you’re probably expecting an even more nebulous answer here, but you’d be wrong. Trappist beers are very strictly defined and far less prolific than you may expect.
The country, which has gained much of its history and personality from its location stuck between France, Germany, and the Netherlands, has held onto more of their traditional brewing practices than any other area in the world. As for Belgian beers as a style, Garret Oliver also says “If you ask three Belgian brewers what defines Belgian beers, it’s likely that you will get thee different answers.” While very true, the one tie that seems to bind most Belgian beers together is their type and use of yeast. It’s worth stressing at this point that even though we need to understand what Belgian beers are to really “get” Trappist beers, not all Trappist beers are Belgian, and not all Belgian beers are Trappist. As I mentioned earlier, they overlap quite a bit, but they’re most definitely not the same.
2. The monastic community determines the policies and provides the means of production.
the community or for social services.
Or to put it more simply, a Trappist beer has to be made by Trappist monks, in a Trappist monastery, and the profits of said beer must go to the monastery or the community to do good deeds. Unlike typical breweries, you can’t just build a Trappist monastery and start brewing your own Trappist beers. Currently, there are a total of eleven* Trappist breweries in the world including six in Belgium, two in the Netherlands, and one each in Austria, Italy, and even the United States. See, I meant it when I said they’re not all Belgian beers. The breweries, in order of their opening, are:
1. Brasserie de Rochefort – Belgium, 1595 2. Brouwerij der Trappisten van Westmalle – Belgium, 1836 3. Brouwerij Westvleteren/St Sixtus – Belgium, 1838 4. Bières de Chimay – Belgium, 1863 5. Brouwerij der Sint-Benedictusabdij de Achelse Kluis – Belgium 1871 6. Brouwerij de Koningshoeven (La Trappe) – Netherlands, 1884 7. Brasserie d'Orval – Belgium, 1931 8. Stift Engelszell – Austria, 2012 9. St. Joseph’s Abbey – Massachusetts, United States, 2013 10. Brouwerij Abdij Maria Toevlucht – Netherlands, 2013 11. Tre Fontane Abbey – Italy, 2014
*Note: The International Trappist Association (ITA) lists twelve Trappist breweries, as they separate Zundert/De Kievit Trappist Brewery from its parent brewery, Brouwerij Abdij Maria Toevlucht. It’s a small distinction, but worth mentioning for the sake of correctness. To quickly review, a Trappist is a monk, Trappist beer has to be made by monks, in a monastery, and the money must be used for good in the community or monastery, of which there are a total of eleven around the world. It’s worth noting that Trappists aren’t the only monks in the beer game. The brewing of beer has a long history with religion, especially in the area we now know as Belgium. Beers that are tied to a religious order that isn’t Trappist are referred to as “Abbey” beers, and are obviously much more prolific than official Trappist beers.
Trappist Beer Characteristics
In the beginning of this little history lesson I said that Trappist beers are more a genre of beer than a specific style, and while this is indeed true, there are some specific characteristics that nearly all Trappist beers have in common.
Other than these key styles, Belgian Blondes are found sometimes as are the rare funky/sour variety as is found with Orval.
The Best Beer in the World
A great place to wrap up the topic of Trappist beers is with a specific beer that many claim to be the best beer in the world. While not available in Pittsburgh even when it is sold in the United States, Westvleteren 12 is brewed by Brouwerij Westvleteren at the St Sixtus Trappist Abbey. This Trappist ale is brewed more to the idea of monastic beer than nearly any other available today. The small brewery sells the majority of this outstanding 10.5% ABV beer simply known by the name “12” and sporting a yellow cap from the monastery, with very little making it to the general public outside of travel distance of Westvleteren. The monks here brew on average once per week and remain implacably noncommercial. In fact, the only “Westy 12” to be officially sold in the United States happened in 2016 thanks to the need for a new roof and other structural maintenance for the monastery.
Trappist beers start by all sharing the use of top-fermenting yeast, or ale yeast as it’s also known. Trappist beers are never pasteurized and contain no additives or cost-saving adjuncts (for the sake of solely saving on beer cost). Trappist beers also all have sugar added to the wort in the kettle, and they are all carbonated via bottle conditioning. Since 1997, all official Trappist beers are denoted with a hexagonal logo on their label from the ITA. This guarantees that the beer in question is indeed a Trappist ale that meets the three key criteria above as well as the general characteristics just mentioned. Beyond these general guidelines/characteristics, there are some primary styles that are associated with Trappist beers, most of which are also common Belgian beer styles, a few of which we’ll look at next.
Trappist Beer Styles
Trappist beers, like their Belgian beer brethren, often fall into a numerical type of style. Starting with a Single, or Enkel, and wrapping up with a Quadrupel. The Enkel-style is brewed primarily for the monks themselves to drink. These beers are what we would call a Session beer, or the French often call a Table Beer. They’re low in alcohol and sometimes light in flavor, making them perfect for daily consumption without getting drunk easily. More common than the Enkel, a Dubbel is often found to be around 7% ABV and features spicy/fruity yeast notes, and flavors of dark fruits like raisins, figs, and prunes. Dubbels are darker in color and are far more sweet than bitter or dry. Next up is the widely loved Trippel, a beer that’s slightly higher in alcohol content than a Dubbel but totally different in flavor and appearance. While a Dubbel is dark and sweet a Trippel is light-colored as well as brighter and zestier in flavor. Think less raisin and prune, and more lemon, orange, and bready malt. Last in the numerical line of beer names is the Quadrupel, or Quad as it’s commonly known. Quads are kind of like the big brother to the Dubbel style. In them you’ll find the same dark, sweet, malty flavors found in a Dubbel, but along for the ride is a much higher ABV typically in the 1013% ABV range as well as more complex flavors like chocolate, spice, and even a little earthy tobacco (in a good way, I promise).
St. Sixtus Trappist Abbey
Trappist Beer Found Here
While you may not be able to get Westvleteren beers in Pittsburgh, there are a number of official Trappist beers that make it to our shores. While we may not have any Pittsburgh Trappist beers, some commonly found examples for you to try include:
• Westmalle Dubbel • Chimay Rouge, Bleue, and Blanche • Trappistes Rochefort 6, 8, and 10 • Orval (my personal all-time favorite beer) Fear not, as you can try great examples of these beers without the official Trappist designation, just look for Abbey ales or even simply Belgian beers in the Enkel, Dubbel, Trippel, and Quadrupel styles and you’ll have a similar experience. Trappist beers are about more than specific taste, aromas, and ingredients, they’re like a time machine that takes you back in time to experience beer as it was brewed and enjoyed hundreds of years ago. While we all love the New Beers on the Block (just not Hangin’ Tough with them), there’s something special about beers that have gone mostly unchanged since the Knights Templar were out hiding their treasures. Brian Meyer is a Boston terrier enthusiast and beer journalist with a drinking hobby and a running problem. You can find him on twitter @HoppedRunner and buy him a beer @ any bar.
CraftPittsburgh.com
Beer from a monastery is brewed to give the monks something to drink that’s safe as well as something for nourishment, especially when they abstain from real food for fasting. It’s also brewed to sell to travels and the general public to raise funds for the monastery. Because of this, the styles common to Trappist ales tend to fall into one of these two use cases.
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handcrafted
BREWING UP
Words & Photos Beth Kurtz Taylor
HISTORY A mere six-hour drive from Pittsburgh, Colonial Williamsburg offers immersion into the 1700s for all ages. Even though I’ve traveled there periodically for the past 20 or so years, there are always new facets to experience. Imagine my pleasure when the weekly guide included this gem: The Arts and Mysteries of Brewing
“Beer was a common beverage in the 18th century, even for children. Enjoy this enlightening demonstration of the brewing process as it was practiced in the 18th century.” - Governor’s Palace Scullery I showed up at 10 a.m. to the scullery to find a crowd of about 20 already gathered on the benches outside of the building adjacent to the Governor’s Palace. Inside we were greeted by Frank Clark, who has the enviable position of supervising Historic Foodways. This division of Colonial Williamsburg researches 18th-century food, dining practices and cooking techniques using period tools and two functioning colonial kitchens. Employed in this department since 1993, his research focused primarily on historic beer and brewing during his five-year apprentice period.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
A large cast iron cooking pot suspended by a crane hovered over the flames in the open hearth and a large wooden bucket used for the mashing process stood at the ready. Boiled water from the kettle was transported to the mash tun where it was stirred into the malted grain with a wooden mash rake. For the all-day demonstration, Frank and his staff, Kim Costa and Tyler Wilson, set out to brew three batches of a brown stout porter from the same grain bill, about 60 percent pale and 40 percent dark malted barley. This was common practice for the colonists, as beer consumption in all households was the norm; ales were safer to drink than water and were thought to be nutritious, which is why children consumed a weak beer. The whole-day process during which the grains was mashed three times produced first a strong ale, table beer and a small beer varying in ABV from 10% at the highest down to 3%.
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Those in power, such as the Colonial Governors, quaffed fine English Ales. Military officers drank pale ales and porters were often shipped in for the enlisted men. For other households, home brewing was most often relegated to women or slaves, yet another daily chore. Commoners, for the most part, drank flat beer from barrels as bottles, cork and wire to secure them were luxury items. Prior to the revolution, the Crown profited from beers made in the colonies. Every ingredient needed for the production of beer, including fuel, was taxed heavily. It is estimated that 1/3 of the revenue that the Brits amassed from the colonies came from taxes on beer production.
Today, Colonial Williamsburg’s food historians demonstrate period brewing techniques about four times a year in the spring and fall. It was too costly to brew in the winter as the process required much more fuel and hot summer temperatures sometime adversely effected fermentation. Usually, as brewers in the 18th century did, they harvest yeast during the process to use in the next batch or dry it into cakes used for baking. When the beer is ready for consumption, visitors unfortunately cannot partake as the rustic period kitchens are not up to health code. The product is often used in recipe demonstrations, perhaps in a beef stew, in the other estate kitchens throughout the colonial town. Over the years Frank partnered with Geoff Logan, of Williamsburg Alewerks, to convert 18th Century recipes to large scale production. Four are served in Williamsburg’s historic taverns and can be purchased in the gift shops: Old Stitch (brown ale), Dear Old Mum (spiced ale), Toby’s Triple Threads (porter), Wetherburn’s Tavern (Bristol ale). For those interested in exploring more deeply the subject of historic brewing, two upcoming events will pique your interest: April 22, 2018 H istoric Homebrewing Class: Ale Through the Ages, one-day class held at Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C. Oct. 19-21, 2018 A le Through the Ages: three-day symposium held at Colonial Williamsburg.
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Words Ben Emminger Photos Rusty Rail
Rusty Rail Brewing Experiences Pittsburgh Hospitality Through Collaborative Projects
T
he term, “Community,” can mean a number of things to a number of individuals. Defined as, “A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common,” any group’s boundaries can be as anyone defines them; they can be as open or as restrictive as they please. In the craft beer community of Pittsburgh, the neighborhood limits are not so much restrictive as they are welcoming. So, while only a few establishments have claimed space in the area, the idea of being a local brewery has stretched far beyond the city limits. A perfect example of the community outreaching the zip codes can be found in Mifflinburg, Pa, the home of Rusty Rail Brewing Company. Based in the heart of the state and roughly a three-hour drive from the Steel City, it would, at first glance, seem farfetched to believe that these individuals would have a strong hometown presence in the Pittsburgh area. Through the efforts of their local sales representative, however, as well as a dash of the previously mentioned Pittsburgh hospitality, they have shown that it does not take a 412 area code to be considered a, “local brew.” Rusty Rail has successfully launched not one, but three collaborations with breweries in the Pittsburgh region, combining their talents with Mindful Brewing Company, Rivertowne Brewing and Full Pint Brewing Company in the past few months. Their continued staying power can truly be credited to the extensive efforts of Rusty Rail’s Regional Sales Ambassador, Damien Gruendl.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
“We’re out in central Pennsylvania, but we really consider Pittsburgh to be an extension of our home market, so I thought it would be cool to incorporate ourselves with all of the local breweries and get some camaraderie built up,” says the sales rep who notes that their presence in Pittsburgh is what they strive to accomplish in each area they distribute to.
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With these collaborating projects (an Imperial Citrus Ale with Mindful, a Chocolate Banana Hefeweizen with Rivertowne and a Belgian Black New England IPA with Full Pint), Rusty Rail has planted its roots in the Pittsburgh community and experienced this unequaled sense of neighborliness amongst the Steel City breweries. “Everybody kind of works together as a collaborative team to help promote craft beer as a whole rather than their individual brewery and make it a competitive nature,” states Mike ‘Schmidty’ Schmidt of Rivertowne Brewing. “I’m lucky enough in Pittsburgh that we all sort of work together and really, the only actual defined competition that we may have would be somebody that puts a bad beer into the market.”
To add to the idea of everyone working cohesively, Gruendl notes that a common thread amongst their recent collaborations was the notion of passing on knowledge, as Rusty Rail is still working through their adolescent years as an established brewery. “All three times that those guys were at the brewery, they pointed something out in our brewhouse that would increase efficiency or help with quality control or help with a problem that we were having. So, with these collaborations, we were brewing beer, having fun and everything, but they were also collaborating on helping us grow as a brewery,” says Gruendl. Testaments to this wealth of knowledge spread amongst a community would be in Rusty Rail's inaugural Pittsburgh collaboration with Mindful Brewing, which occurred this past summer. While both breweries are relatively new to the scene, their wisdom in the realm was able to be mined for a successful product that embodied the communal spirit that is present in brewers of the region. “I think Pittsburgh is fundamentally a beer town, full stop,” states Marcus Cox, brewer at Mindful Brewing. “The way the proliferation has worked with the breweries is that there’s a lot of small, community-sized operations; there’s no real major one dominating, which means there’s no oversupply and everybody is still in a position where they can be friendly and collaborations are probably the best expression of that.” While the notion of brewers working together is fantastic in its own right, the root of it reaches back to the area’s consumers, who seem to have acquired a greater interest in sipping something from their backyard. “One of the unique things about Pittsburgh is that the people are becoming more willing to seek out these smaller breweries that don’t necessarily need to distribute beer and make these little brewpubs the place to go on a weekend night. The population is much more interested in trying out the little brewpubs than they were when I got into this industry,” says Full Pint brewer and co-owner Sean Hallisey. Rusty Rail, along with Mindful, Rivertowne and Full Pint all have exciting projects in the works for 2018, including a number of opportunities for collaborations amongst Pittsburgh breweries, furthering the unique atmosphere that has surrounded the beer community of the area. With an environment such as Pittsburgh’s, it seems that the community can, and will, grow stronger pour after pour.
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CraftPittsburgh.com
Strange Brew
Words Kristy Locklin
Canadian beer blogger visits the ‘burgh “When I started the blog, I didn’t know what I was talking about,” she says with a laugh. “The audience is learning as I’m learning. I want The Travelling Pint to be a nice, educational, friendly platform for people to learn more about beer and to get out of their sandbox and travel. ” Martin developed a love of beer in her youth, when she took sips from her dad’s bottle of Rickard’s Red Ale. Upon turning 19 — the legal age to drink alcohol in Ontario — she discovered offerings from Quebec brewery Unibroue. Her newly discovered taste for beer dovetailed nicely with her passion for travel.
Tiffany Martin doesn’t just drink beer, she brews beer … and she’s got the mash paddle scars on her hands to prove it! The 38-year-old Canadian is founder of The Travelling Pint, a craft beer and tourism blog. Since launching the site in 2015, she’s visited hundreds of breweries throughout North America, from quaint brew pubs along the East Coast and Midwestern macros to upstarts around her native Ontario that actually invited her to whip up a few batches.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
In early December, she and her husband Bernie made a hop-stop in Pittsburgh.
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“After returning to Pittsburgh again after two years we were pleased by the rapid growth and ever-growing list of local Pittsburgh beer and breweries spread across the city,” she says. “The scene had really taken off and the ones we had a chance to visit were all unique to what they were brewing, super friendly and welcoming and made really great beer.” The couple, who met while working as dog trainers*, first visited the Steel City with their pups, Avalanche and Bowie, to attend a pet-friendly baseball game at PNC Park.
They explored the town, stumbling upon local stalwarts The Church Brew Works and Penn Brewery. Their latest adventure took them to Smallman Galley, Lot 17, Silky’s Pub, Grist House Craft Brewery, Dancing Gnome Brewery and Hitchhiker Brewing Co. She posted dispatches on social media toasting the ‘burgh’s beer culture. “It is great to see some breweries moving into older ‘abandoned’ buildings or areas and bringing some excitement, employment and a sense of community back to that area it is great for any city to do that,” she says. “We were impressed with the fact that in a three day visit we still were not able to cover all that we wanted to as far as beer goes and were able to leave a little behind to make us come back again to this town we have grown to love.” Martin, who has 11,000 Instagram followers, says she connects with people because she isn’t a beer snob … she’s just a girl who loves a good beverage. She posts video reviews, does tutorials on different beer styles and promotes beer-centric products, such as soaps and shampoos.
Not content to stay in one place too long, Martin takes a road trip at least once a month, plotting a course filled with breweries and bars. Within one three-month period, she visited 47 of the suds-making facilities and wrote about each for a magazine. The project got her noticed in the Canadian beer scene, which is currently surging like Niagara Falls. She was invited to speak at the Beer Blogger Conference 2017 and attend craft beer competitions and festivals throughout the Great White North. Bernie Martin, an expert in social media marketing who moonlights as a professional designated driver, says there’s a major perk to his wife’s career choice. “A lot of beer shows up at our doorstep in big trucks,” he says, smiling wide. Using her liquid knowledge, Martin hosts beerand-food pairings at local establishments, including candy stores, cheese shops, restaurants and bakeries. “We’re bringing beer back to the dinner table,” she says. “One of my favorite things is to find someone in the crowd who doesn’t like beer, introduce them properly and have them leaving loving beer.” Visit The Travelling Pint blog at TheTravellingPint.com or on Instagram at @travellingpint. * In wonderfully Canadian fashion, Tiffany Martin used to be a dog sled guide!
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Remembering
Chiodo's CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Newcastle Brown. Hoegaarden. Guinness. If you’re reading this magazine, it’s 2018, you’re probably a well-versed beer fan, and these names are old hat. They’re not hard to find on tap at plenty of places around town. These days, they’re even sold in grocery stores and at gas stations.
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It wasn’t long ago that Pittsburgh’s eyes were opened to the joys of beer from all over the world, outside of the narrow monoculture that domestic, industrial suds had become in the time after Prohibition. For a generation of beer-loving yinzers, the place that broke the mold and ushered in the modern era was Chiodo’s Tavern. For good beer in Pittsburgh, Chiodo’s was a gateway bar .
Joe, Sam and Joe
Sam Smith’s Nut Brown. Lindeman’s Frambroise. Anchor Steam Beer. You may have cut your teeth on some of these beers. They may have been an early step into the big, wide world of non-macro-lager brew. Maybe you’ve moved on to What’s Hot Now and left them in the dust, or maybe one or two still hold a place in your heart.
It’s not a leap to parallel Chiodo’s Tavern and the trajectory of Pittsburgh itself. Joe Chiodo and his family emigrated from Italy in 1927, when Joe was just 9. The Chiodos settled in the Steel Valley, and Joe’s father, Pietro, owned a shoe repair shop in Homestead. When Joe returned from serving in World War II, he worked here, until his father bought the building across the corner with the intent to move the shop there. Instead, he gave the building to Joe, who went into business as a publican.
Every seasoned beer drinker has a “gateway” beer in their memory, one that really opened their eyes to the full spectrum of what the drink has to offer. Experiencing that transition into good beer is like coming out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel and seeing the full panorama sprawling before your eyes — lights, skyline, water, steel. It’s an epiphany.
Selling beer in Homestead — site of the world’s then-largest steel-making facility — was a no-brainer. With U.S. Steel employing thousands of millworkers, Chiodo’s had a natural customer base for decades. If the doors were open, the Iron City was flowing. But with the gradual decline of domestic steel following WWII, came the inevitable ebb in bar business.
By 1980, the stream of thirsty millworkers had slowed to a trickle. Enter two key players. Joe hired his cousin Sam off his gig as a forklift driver for Pepsi to help manage the bar. In the early 1980s, Sam was approached by Joe Och, a hospital employee and beer lover with a foresighted suggestion that saved the tavern: sell imports. This was around 1981, six years before Pennsylvania would even boast its first craft brewery. Craft beer would not take hold on a national level until about a decade later. The great frontier was in imported beer, which was then just starting to make its way into Western PA.
The First of Its Kind
It’s clear even before meeting Ed Vidunas that Chiodo’s Tavern means a lot to him. The proprietor of pittsburghbreweries.com, Vidunas is Pittsburgh’s unofficial beer historian. Prior to meeting, he cautioned warmly that discussing Chiodo’s with him might necessitate a long sit. Settling in to talk at the bar in Piper’s Pub, he sports an authentic Chiodo’s shirt.
“Lutheran” was A.M. Lutheran Beer Distributors, a wholesaler/importer based in West Mifflin. Before its sale to Frank B. Fuhrer Wholesaler in 2008, A.M. Lutheran hunted beyond-the-pale ales and lagers from across the world, supplying the tavern with beers from Canada to Belgium, Honduras to India. And the crowds returned to taste Chiodo’s foreign, flavorful wares. “In early 1982, I walked into Chiodo’s with my buddy Ron Zak,” Vidunas shares. “We came in the front door at 8:00 on a Friday evening, sat at the bar and were greeted by Sam and Marcia, the cook. We were the only four people in the bar the entire time. Within a year, more or less, the tavern went from empty to two deep at the bar.”
All About the Beer
Through the '80s, Chiodo’s was the place in Pittsburgh to find as many different styles of beer as were available all in one place. “A lot of beer drinkers in the early '80s had no idea what a porter was, let alone a Kulmbacher,” Vidunas says.
Words Nathan Stimmel Art Joe Mruk
Ed recalls that Mackeson XXX Stout was an eye-opener in his early Chiodo’s days. He reminisces about when Sam brought Berliner Weiss from Germany, years before the domestic revival of the light, tart wheat style. “He found that it was traditional to add syrup to the beer in the glass, so he went out, bought a raspberry syrup, and gave it to customers at no extra charge. Sam obtained a Rauchbier from Germany. To complement it, he gave customers a few slices of smoked provolone cheese, at no extra charge.” Chiodo’s hosted the Three Rivers Association of Serious Homebrewers (T.R.A.S.H.) for their monthly meetings. There, homebrewers could taste canonical examples of classic styles previously unavailable, and could get a sense of Paulaner Salvator, Pilsner Urquell, or Fuller’s London Pride before taking a stab at their own clone recipes. Hart Johnson, bar manager and beer buyer at Piper’s Pub, relates his Chiodo’s moment.
CraftPittsburgh.com
“There were other places at the time, but nobody had the selection, and that was because of Sam,” recounts Vidunas. “The greatest business man I ever met without an MBA was Sam Chiodo. Before profit or himself, he put customers first. Whatever was new or unheard of, Sam bought it. It took some years, but when he spoke, people listened. When he went to Lutheran and asked for something, they would get it.”
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“You could get Duvel on draft, poured into a proper glass, for about half the price of anywhere else at the time.” For a city that had subsisted on Iron City and other fizzy adjunct lagers, the variety was revelatory. Whatever territory was untrod and exotic — be it Labatt’s and Sol or Chimay Grande Reserve and Eggenberger Urbock 23 (a scale-tipper at 11.5% ABV) — Chiodo’s was where you’d find it.
Word Spreads
The tavern’s reputation grew, attracting adventurous drinkers from all walks of life. “It turned into a landmark, the kind of place TV stations would use to film sports stars,” says Peter Machamer. Now a retired Pitt philosophy professor, Machamer wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s wine column for 15 years, and Chiodo’s became a favorite part of his beat. “They were among the first to make that kind of imprint.” Through the mid-80’s, Machamer covered the annual beer tastings Chiodo’s held for charity. Hosted by Joe Och (who by now was also teaching a beer appreciation course at Pitt), guests were treated to between 12 and 20 blind tastes of beers selected by Sam, often a mix of lagers and ales. The tastings began small, with crowds of around 20, and over years grew by multiples. Guests would converse, favorites were picked, and comments were shared for the reading audience’s benefit. “One of the best lines, I’ll never forget, is one that couldn’t be printed in a neighborhood paper.” Machamer muses about a fairly well-known female TV news reporter describing a beer as being “like an angel pissing on your tongue”. The celestial beer in question? St. Pauli Girl. It wasn’t just local celebs who felt at home at Chiodo’s. Over the years, the bar was visited by famous faces of all stripes, including actors George Wendt and Jeff Goldblum, homebrewer extraordiaire Charlie Papazian, a number of Pittsburgh sports figures. Legend has it that Prince Charles was due for a stop (though sadly never materialized).
A Tearful Farewell
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Joe Chiodo’s health declined, and he passed in August 2007 at age 89. He wasn’t able to sell the tavern, as the building had become something of a liability. The scads of eclectic, eccentric memorabilia (including the infamous clothesline of patron donated bras that hung from the ceiling) were auctioned off when the tavern closed in 2005, and the building was razed shortly thereafter. In Ed Vidunas’ eyes, it was a hard pill to swallow, but ultimately the right thing to do: “I’d rather it be torn down than turned into something it wasn’t.” At the end of what’s now called the Homestead Grays Bridge stands a Walgreen’s on what was once ground zero for Pittsburgh’s beer renaissance.
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Peter Machamer remembers Joe Chiodo as a dear friend. “Joe was one of Pittsburgh’s great characters. He was nice to everyone.” Peter was among those whom Joe approached to buy the tavern, obviously to no avail. “I was tempted, but it didn’t seem to fit in too well with a philosophy career. Plus,” jokes Machamer, “I might have ended up an alcoholic.” Those with first-hand memories of Chiodo’s Tavern are aging, and much of the younger generation may have never heard of, much less set foot in, the place. In the time since Chiodo’s opened, other touchstone Pittsburgh beer bars like Sharp Edge, Fat Head’s, and D’s had put their roots down and perpetuated the scene. It’s hard to deny that many owe a debt to the trail blazed by Joe and Sam. “There were tears in people’s eyes when they closed,” Ed recalls. “There have been lots of places with a lot of beer, but not quite in the same way."
Many thanks to
Joe Chiodo (great nephew of the tavern’s owner) for sharing the original Post-Gazette articles; to Buzzy Torek for putting us in touch; to Michele Chiodo Stone (Sam’s granddaughter) for details on the family’s history; and to Ed Vidunas and Peter Machamer for sharing their personal memories.
Authentic Chiodo's t-shirt courtesy of Ed Vidunas
Deep Cuts A selection of more obscure beers detailed from Chiodo’s benefit tastings, as reported in Peter Machamer’s articles from the P-G . This gives an idea of the breadth of imports available at this venue decades ago.
From the U.K
Ridley’s Bishop Ale • Chester Golden Ale • Toby Ale Wrexhen • John Courage • Felinfoel John Brown Tolly Original Premium • Yorkshire Old Peculier Watney’s Stingo Old Ale
From Germany & Austria
Sailor Pils • Kaiserdom Pilsner • Altenmunster Zipfer Urfypk • Halsten • Eggenberger Schlosspils Urbock 17 & 23 • Grosser • Eku Bavaria Special Reserve
From all over
Molson Brador (Canada - a malt liquor) • Dos Equis Oktoberfest (Mexico) • Taj Mahal Lager (India) Pilsen Callao (Peru) • Nordic Wolf Light (Sweden) Fisher La Belle (France) • Aass Pilsner (Norway) Tooth’s Sheatl (Australia) • Poretti Oro (Italy) Riva 2000 (Belgium)
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s e i P & ! s t n Pi
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Bayernhof The late Charles B. Brown III wasn’t a big drinker, but there are beer steins and fully stocked bars in every room of his 19,000-squarefoot home. Built between 1976 and 1982, the not-so-humbleabode — which is now known as Bayernhof Museum — sits on a hilltop overlooking the Allegheny River near Sharpsburg. “On a clear day you can see all the way to West Virginia,” says Dan Yeager, who serves as the mansion’s maintenance man. The view inside is even more spectacular. Brown founded Gas-Lite Manufacturing Co., in Lawrenceville in 1963 and went on to make millions. He used his fortune to create Bayernhof and fill it with a quirky collection of vintage music machines, artwork, German brewing memorabilia and knickknacks (mostly beer-chugging gnomes). The house boasts 10 fireplaces, eight full baths, three powder rooms, three kitchens, a sauna, a tanning room, a Jacuzzi, a wine cellar, an elevator, a conference room, a pool table used in the 1961 Paul Newman flick “The Hustler”, an observatory with a 16-inch reflecting telescope and an indoor swimming pool that is accessible through a hidden hallway made to resemble a cave. Like a gag from a “Scooby Doo” episode, simply pull a sword from a wall-mounted coat-of-arms and the entrance to the cave is revealed. “Every room is based on King Ludwig’s castle in Bavaria,” says Jim Mousseau, a retired music teacher who now serves as a museum guide.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Tours, which cost $10, are by appointment only.
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Brown amassed most of his extensive beer stein collection in Bavaria, but rarely drank a drop of the beverage. Ironically, the newly opened Eleventh Hour Brewery is housed in an old Gas-Lite property. Visitors to the Lawrenceville tap room can even enjoy a nice, cold pint of Bayernhof Marzen. When Brown died in 1999, he was buried in a surprisingly modest grave in Allegheny Cemetery, just a stone’s throw from Eleventh Hour. “Chuck didn’t drink, but if you wanted to drink, he’d be the best host,” Mousseau says with a laugh.
CraftPittsburgh.com
Words Kristry Locklin Photos Buzzy Torek
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Check out the rest of the photos at CraftPittsburgh.com Special thanks to Danielle Yeager for the story suggestion.
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hoppy couple
ELWOOD'SPUB 163 Little Deer Creek Valley Rd. Rural Ridge elwoodspub.com
Joe
Location
Elwood’s Pub, named after the dog of husband-and-wife owners Dave and Kathy Crowell, is located in Rural Ridge, Pa., which is a short drive north of the city. It is a small, unassuming craft beer bar and restaurant that you really gotta check out. Easy to get to and plenty of parking are the first things you’ll notice about Elwood’s Pub … but there’s so much more inside. As always, when you are a few minutes from Pittsburgh there are plenty of other breweries and pubs nearby. Maybe stop at Leaning Cask in Springdale before you head north
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Beer
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We got a chance to chat a good bit with owners Kathy and Dave while we were at Elwood’s for the first time and they are probably the sweetest small business owners of all time. Getting in on the craft beer scene super early, they really strive to sell mostly local Pittsburgh beers but also offer many other beers from around the entire state. Breweries like Victory, Troeg’s, and Full Pint are likely always available at Elwood’s. I tried a local Fury Brewing beer for the first time ever and it was a delicious stout called Stealth. Now we need to visit Fury Brewing, too! There’s a beer style for everyone at Elwood’s and the owners pride themselves on their keen ability to serve the best craft beer Pennsylvania has to offer.
Atmosphere
Elwood’s has been owned by Dave and Kathy for 17 years but has been a local haunt for almost 100 years. Crazy, right? It was an old coal miner bar in the 1920s and then became a bit of a biker bar many years later for a short time. As soon as we sat at the bar it felt like I had been there 100 times. Very cozy and welcoming and our bartender, Rachel, was ready to go. We happened to be at Elwood’s on a trivia night which happens every Wednesday and of course our team name was ‘The Hoppy Couple’. I wish I lived closer to Elwood’s because I didn’t want to leave. Don’t forget to pay tribute to the giant painting of their beloved pet, Elwood, when you visit.
Food
I’m starting to appreciate a small menu the more I go to places like Elwood’s. Sometimes menus can just be overwhelming. Elwood’s Pub has what I would consider a perfectly sized menu. Sides, sandwiches, and salads, for the most part. Their food is simple and well executed. I must admit, I saw pulled pork on the menu and kind of stopped looking. This sandwich was GIANT and filled with homemade pulled pork that was topped with homemade coleslaw. It was messy, as pulled pork should be, and delicious. We also tried one of their soft pretzels with the homemade beer cheese that Elwood’s makes right on the spot. Really, really good. Next time I’ll have to try their fish sandwich. I caught a glimpse of it and thought, yep, next time!
Amanda Location
The cozy hideaway that is Elwood’s Pub is about 20 minutes north of the city, just a few exits up Route 28. If you’re heading to Elwood’s by way of 28 from the city, you’ll be passing by Millvale and Sharpsburg, the “quadfecta” of neighborhood breweries: Grist House, Draai Laag, Dancing Gnome, and Hitchhiker. Conny Creek Brewing Company (in New Kensington) and Leaning Cask Brewery (in Springdale) are also just a few minutes from Elwood’s.
Beer
Kathy and Dave are veritable craft beer pioneers in Pittsburgh. They were slingin’ the good stuff to their guests before it was the norm. They shared with us some great stories about meeting new brewers and sampling now well-known beers. If you’re looking for a beer recommendation while you’re there, Kathy is the in-house expert! We got to chat with them for a bit and I was so curious what their favorite beers were, given that they’ve served so many great brews in their 17 years of business. Kathy is a fan of the brown ales, usually, while Dave goes for more Belgian strong ales. They both have one favorite beer in common for sure: Mad Elf! Who doesn’t love a good Mad Elf?!
Atmosphere
Home, sweet home. That’s where you are when you’re at Elwood’s. Not only does the building itself feel homey, but Kathy and Dave will likely be there cooking your food and pouring your beer, just as if you were a guest in their own home. Our server, Rachel, fit right into that mold, too, and made us feel right at home. We sat at the bar but there is also a dining room and a cool downstairs area with a few arcade games which was a fun surprise! Elwood’s is also known for their live music which is offered most nights. We were there on trivia night (and no, we did not win!) though I’d love to go back for some of their musicians soon! Kathy is to beer as Dave is to food. Dave is cooking up some spectacular dishes at Elwood’s. I haven’t had a buffalo chicken sandwich in ages so when I saw it on their menu I jumped all over it and oh...my...gosh. So good! They have the best fries, too. Not only that, but this amazing husband-and-wife duo have been hosting beer tasting and food pairing events for ages. The Society of Beertasters (yes, S.O.B.s!) events are held the 3rd Tuesday of every month. S.O.B. nights offer craft beer samples paired with tasty food and a little education along the way. At just $15 per person, this sounds like the best way to spend a Tuesday!
Summary
Elwood’s Pub is a home away from home and makes for a nice cozy night out surrounded by friends. Good food, great company, and local beers; what more could you ask for?! When you stop by, tell Kathy and Dave (and Rachel!) we said hi! You don’t want to miss out on this hidden gem.
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Food
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CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Words Tom Marshall Photos Jeff Zoet
My name is Tom, and I have been working in the craft beer industry in one capacity or another over the past six years. Pin Pals is a bimonthly installment where I interview a veritable who's who of the craft beer world at a bowling alley. We drink beer, shoot the shit, and,of course, bowl. In this installment, we are bowling and chatting with two of the board members of the newly founded Pittsburgh Libations Week, Jason Cercone (Executive Director) and Jaron Barton (Vice President).
10 Frames / 10 Beers Light
Genesee Brewing
Cream Ale
Cream Ale
Dark
Millersburg Brewing
Nut House
Peanut Butter Porter
6.25% ABV
Little
Hitchhiker Brewing
Stranger Than Me
Gose w/ mango & pineapple
4.2% ABV
Big
Founders Brewing
KBS [2017]
Bourbon Barrel Aged Imp. Stout
11.8% ABV
Pale
Tired Hands Brewing
Hop Hands
American Pale Ale
5.5% ABV
Sour
Draai Laag Brewing
Grimace
Wild Ale w/ black currants
9.5% ABV
Malt
Rhinegeist Brewing
Dad
Red Ale
6.0% ABV
Saison aged in red wine Barrels
6.3% ABV
Smoked Baltic Porter
9.3% ABV
NR. 14 GILJAGAUR
10.0% ABV
Wheat
Blackberry Farms Brewery
Brett Saison [2016]
Wild Card
Hill Farmstead
Fear & Trembling
Import
Borg BrugghĂźs
NR. 14 GILJAGAUR
5.1% ABV
1) Tell us about yourself.
Jason: I moved to Pittsburgh in 2003 from Bradford, Pa. I have a wonderful 8-year-old daughter and an incredible girlfriend. I've been a big fan of beer and spirits for many years, including a few of them when it wasn't exactly legal to be partaking. My career path took several detours until I decided to chase my passion and founded Breaking Brews in 2014. Breaking Brews started as a craft beer blog and has evolved into a full-service libations information hub and marketing company. In addition to providing adult beverage news, features, education and commentary, I specialize in content creation, social media management, brand management and marketing and media concepts for libations and service industry organizations. Alongside all of that, I plan to set the sport of bowling back at least 10 years this evening. Jaron: I am a pharmacist by day and craft beer enthusiast by night. I am the creator, host and producer of the Craft Beer Industry Podcast. For the past two years, I have been traveling all over the world drinking craft beer and interviewing members of the local and national craft beer scene for my podcast. You can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play Music. Bowling is not my forte. I've only broke 100 once before (EDITOR'S NOTE: Until TONIGHT -- Jaron broke 100 twice! Beer really is the source of miracles).
2) If you were a beer, what type would you be?
Jason: I'd be a Double IPA - big, bold, tasty and as aromatic as the day is long. Jaron: Definitely a Gose - funky, sour and altogether lovable.
3) Who/What can you attribute your love of craft beer to?
Jason: I owe my first sip of craft beer to my late Uncle Mark. He was a huge fan of Breckenridge Avalanche and would score himself a case from time to time. One of those occasions happened when I was 16 and he invited me over to try it out. My frame of reference on beer was nonexistent at that point in my life, but this experience taught me that higher quality beers existed … I just needed to find them. My uncle was more like a big brother to me and I miss him every day. I like to believe that if he was still with us, I'd be returning the favor and introducing him to incredible beers every chance I got. Jaron: My dad was strictly a Rolling Rock guy while I was growing up. It was all we ever had in the fridge (not that there's anything wrong with that). My Uncle Barry gave me a Newcastle Brown Ale when I was in my twenties, which was my introduction to different, more flavorful beer. Every time Barry came to visit, he brought me a new craft beer. This eventually led to Barry converting my dad into a craft beer drinker as well.
of craft beer is so much better than domestic beer. There is a natural progression into craft once you find that first enjoyable craft beer-- aka a "bridge beer." It will change your perception of craft beer and make you a more mindful beer drinker.
6) What is Pittsburgh Libations Week and what do you hope it will accomplish?
Jason: Pittsburgh Libations Week is a celebration of our city's entire adult beverage culture. Living in Pittsburgh, we are fortunate to have so much incredible beer, wine, spirits, mead and cider at our disposal. These companies are winning awards on national and international levels and each of them deserves the proper platform to recognize what they do and promote their mission and philosophies 365 days a year. Our initiative is built on the concepts of education, community, camaraderie and communication and our goal is to shine the spotlight on the makers, the sales force, the media, the wholesalers and the enthusiasts … all of whom play integral roles in making our libations scene so special. We plan to be a year-round force in Pittsburgh's adult beverage landscape, serving up fun, unique and educational events while giving back to the community in numerous ways. And when our inaugural Libations Week kicks off Oct. 12, 2018, we will deliver nine days of adult beverage excellence the likes of which Pittsburgh has never seen, focusing strongly on the education aspect of our mission and hosting events with speakers, sommeliers, cicerones, business owners, libations producers and much more. Jaron: What I hope to accomplish with Pittsburgh Libations Week (adding to what Jason already touched on) is something that we ran into at Beers of the Burgh this past November. We had a booth set up to share the PLW mission and answer any questions about what PLW is all about. The initial responses were overwhelmingly positive. More often than not, we had people talk about how their friends, family and loved ones may like a certain type of libation (e.g. beer), but they liked a different one (e.g. wine) themselves. The idea of a platform that celebrates craft beverages of all types was very appealing because it will offer something for everyone. Additionally, with the recent law changes in Pennsylvania (PA beverage producers are legally allowed to carry all other PA-made libations), there has been a push in the Pittsburgh craft beverage scene to give options for all types of drinkers at their establishments. Breweries are now selling wine and distilleries have beer on tap to complement their cocktail menus. This type of co-mingling in the industry is exactly why Libations Week is needed. We want to shine a spotlight on everyone and foster more relationships across the adult beverage scene.
4) What was the last beer you had (outside of your comfort zone) that you really enjoyed?
Jason: I'm not a big sour guy, but the Blackberry Farms Brett Saison we are drinking tonight is very enjoyable. Jaron: Borg Saison Leifur NR.32. I had it during my trip to Iceland in October earlier this year. It was delicious and impressive considering I didn't know what to expect from Icelandic Beer.
Jason: It's not that you don't like craft beer … it's that you just haven't found the right beer for you. You can't rule out the entire world of beer based on one or two not landing in your wheelhouse. A fair warning: If you see me pouring at a sampling for one of the breweries I represent and you tell me you don't like IPAs or stouts, I'm giving you an IPA or a stout to try. You never know … that may be the one you love. Overall, find a style you like and expand on it. Pilsners, amber ales, and wheat beers are great beers to enjoy that will begin expanding your horizons. Jaron: You just haven't found the one for you. The quality and flavor
CraftPittsburgh.com
5) What do you tell someone who claims he/ she doesn't like beer?
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7) W hy do you feel PLW is something the PGH adult beverage community needs?
Jason: Certain existing models designed to celebrate aspects of the adult beverage scene here in Pittsburgh are incomplete, mismanaged, under-serving their community and have failed to adapt and evolve with the times. If you're not in this to help the entire community evolve and succeed, you're in it for the wrong reasons. We have developed a stellar drinking scene in Pittsburgh with breweries, wineries, distilleries, meaderies and cider houses blazing remarkable trails and every single one of them deserves proper notoriety. And let's not forget the outstanding beverages that wholesalers bring us from all over the world. Our entire libations industry deserves the best. Libations enthusiasts deserve the best. Pittsburgh as a whole deserves the best. This is why Libations Week was created and why our presence will be felt year-round throughout our community. Jaron: From doing my podcast and talking with people in the craft beer industry, I got the feeling people weren't happy with the current set-up in Pittsburgh. When I first heard about Jason's idea for Pittsburgh Libations Week, I thought it was the perfect system to alleviate the many frustrations about promotion, education and events that were expressed. When Jason asked me to get involved and join the board, I was very excited because I thought we could improve upon the current system in place and I loved the aspect of including the entire libations scene. When I discussed Libations Week and its mission with the same people who voiced concerns, they said they are looking forward to what this new idea can bring.
8) How do you connect with businesses throughout PGH to build on your vision?
Jason: I'm a proponent of pounding the pavement and building relationships with as many businesses and organizations as possible to help in building our mission. I've spoken to many business owners about developing year-long partnerships with PLW and interest to this point has been high. In addition, we are committed to building a strong online presence. We are very active on social media and our website is user-friendly, easy to navigate and will feature the events you want to know about during 2018 and beyond. Finally, we have incorporated the Breaking Brews blog and Drink Pittsburgh mobile app as part of our mission and both serve as resources that connect businesses and enthusiasts to the development of PLW. Jaron: We are focused on education and what we can do to bring people into the mix year-round. We are not just looking to connect with alcohol purveying businesses, but all types of organizations, services and causes because PLW is celebration of Pittsburgh. Your business may not be a producer or purveyor of adult beverages, but I'm willing to bet your staff and those who comprise your company enjoy a tasty beverage when the work day concludes. It's those people who make our enthusiast base so strong in Pittsburgh and our corporate sponsors will be immersed into the libations scene with educational opportunities, trips and tours to production facilities, happy hours and more. We embrace the idea of community and that includes everyone.
9) What aspect of the adult beverage community do you hope to build upon?
Jason: For me, there's two: camaraderie and education. There is a high level of mutual respect among the adult beverage industry and all constantly push each other to the next level. This respect leads to collaborations and, in my opinion, the final product we all get to enjoy when multiple visions and philosophies mesh doesn't just bring us a delicious liquid in our glass, but transcends the beverage itself when professionals work together. When multiple creative minds come together, the possibilities are endless. Regarding education, it's been a focus of mine since I launched Breaking Brews and continues with every initiative I tackle. Educated drinkers are more comfortable in their settings and aren't afraid to ask more questions, learning the most they can about each individual product and business. Solid, consistent education will help businesses grow organically. Jaron: What I hope we can build on with Pittsburgh Libations Week is more collaboration between the different segments of the Pittsburgh libations scene. I think that aspect of PLW is the most exciting and intriguing part of our entire mission. The idea of breweries collaborating with meaderies and wineries collaborating with distilleries is appealing to all types of drinkers, and this collaborative spirit will appeal to everyone. We plan to celebrate and recognize all collaboration efforts and by letting creators come together and do what they do best.
10) When is PLW and how can get updates/ information about your events and news?
Jason & Jason: Pittsburgh Libations Week kicks off Friday, Oct. 12, 2018 and runs through Oct. 20. Those nine days are going to be great, but we are equally focused on our presence the other 356 days of the year as well. We are here year-round and will serve as a trusted resource for businesses and enthusiasts alike. You can learn more about what we're all about by visiting pittsburghlibationsweek.com, following us on Twitter: @pghlibationweek, and checking us out on Facebook and Instagram: @pghlibationsweek. To get involved and partner with us, shoot us a message at pghlibationsweek@gmail.com. Tom Marshall, a former teacher and bowling enthusiast, is sales and marketing manager for Full Pint Brewing Company in North Versailles. Twitter: @thomas_poet
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CraftPittsburgh.com
plates & pints
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Gaucho PARRILLA ARGENTINA
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Words Drew Cranisky Photos Buzzy Torek
UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN UNDER A GREAT, BIG ROCK FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, YOU KNOW ABOUT GAUCHO It’s not hard to find. Follow the enticing scent of smoke and beef down Penn Avenue, or just look for the line that often stretches down the block. Since opening in 2013, the casual Strip District spot has gained a devoted following for their brand of wood-fired Argentinian cuisine. But, as we learned at a recent blowout basement dinner, there’s a lot more to Gaucho than long lines and lovely meats. Though it’s only a flight of stairs away from the main dining area, the basement space at Gaucho (dubbed the Bodega) is a different world. Removed from the noise and the crowds, the Bodega is a homey, yet elegant, private dining room that can be booked for events or a family-style meal. The CraftPittsburgh team, the owners of Helicon Brewing and several members of the Gaucho crew recently gathered there for a sort of experiment. We would be part of a test run of the Bodega Brew dinners, a series of beer dinners that owner Anthony Falcon hopes to launch in early 2018. To help the Gaucho team work out the format, we would need to eat, drink and swap stories for a few hours. A tough job, to be sure.
The meal began, as all meals should, with bountiful platters of meat and cheese and an array of fluffy empanadas. Though the first course was meant to pair with Helicon’s Helles lager, Falcon cracked open their American pale ale instead (see the sidebar for more on the beers). It was a happy accident, as the crisp, lightly bitter beer was bold enough to stand up to salty cured meats and zippy sauces. And once everyone was snacking and sipping, Falcon began to tell us his story. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and Gaucho is no exception. Approaching 40 years old and with more than two decades of professional cooking under his belt, Falcon found himself unemployed and at loose ends back in 2012. “At that point, it really did not seem to fit for me to work for somebody else,” he explains. So he scraped together the funds, found a choice location between Downtown and the heart of the Strip District, and opened what he affectionately refers to now as “Baby Gaucho.” “We started with a tiny 800-square-foot spot,” Falcon says. “It was about six counter stools in there … ” “Seven!” interjects Greg Klein, Falcon’s business partner. “But one broke. We lost 18 percent of our business,” he jokes. But it’s true that the original Gaucho was little more than a grill, a counter and a few friendly faces. Despite what Falcon calls “some seriously humble beginnings,” Gaucho quickly started to attract attention, earning accolades both locally and nationally for their bold flavors and raucous atmosphere. Long lines became a common sight, and the little kitchen had to fire on all cylinders to keep up with demand. So when the opportunity for expansion arose, it was a no-brainer.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
In 2015, Gaucho took over the space next door. In a historic building that had been a police station, Harley dealership, strip club and a dozen other identities over its 150-year history, Falcon and his team built “Gaucho Grande,” jumping from a cramped lunch counter to a full-fledged restaurant. With indoor and outdoor seating for nearly a hundred, a private event space and an offsite catering operation, Gaucho today looks quite different than it did four years ago. But Falcon says the transition has been surprisingly smooth.
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“Really the only difference that we’ve seen— from Baby Gaucho to Gaucho Grande—is that we’ve gotten better at what we do,” he explains. “And we’ve had some blessings along the way.” The next two courses came in quick succession, and soon our table was heaving with all manner of charred meats. We tucked into grilled shrimp topped with piquant quiquirimichi sauce, a
sweet and spicy Parma chorizo made specially for Gaucho, garlicky chicken thighs and grilled sirloin with bright chimichurri, all washed down with Helicon’s Helles lager. The spread was stunning without being showy. “We just like to let things speak for themselves,” says executive chef Matt Neal. “We do very little to them and just let them shine.” This unfussy approach is on display in dishes like the “Rusted Roots,” a hodgepodge of roasted root vegetables seasoned with thyme. The dish is a fixture on Gaucho’s regular menu, available for the cheeky price of $4.20. The food at Gaucho is near and dear to Falcon. “It’s in my blood,” he explains. The son of a Uruguayan immigrant, Falcon grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by South American food.
“This is how my family ate. We always had chimichurris, chorizo, chicken … all these things are staples.” Though Gaucho is billed as a “Parrilla Argentina” — an Argentinian grill — Falcon will be the first to tell you that their food is hardly traditional. Instead, Falcon and his team look to South American cuisine for inspiration, reimagining classic dishes to create a menu that is uniquely Gaucho. After a couple of hours of utter indulgence, dessert rolled around: chocolate bread pudding paired with Helicon’s oatmeal stout. Falcon paused to reflect on Gaucho’s success. “Really, the relationships that you build with people are paramount above anything,” he says. “Connect and surround yourself with people who share a common drive for hospitality and taking care of people and trying to be the best at what they do.”
THE BEER "I like to drink beer all day, every day,” laughs Chris Brunetti, owner of Helicon Brewing in Oakdale. To that end, Helicon specializes in approachable, low-ABV beers rather than the hop bombs and boozy monsters that dominate American craft beer. Brunetti and his wife Cherie brought three of their food-friendly beers to share.
AMERICAN PALE ALE
“We do have some IPAs, but I like the American pale ale because it’s more malt and hop balanced,” Brunetti says. “Something that’s not face-shredding that will go well with food.” Brewed with Cascade, Simcoe and Amarillo hops, Helicon’s APA is full of character at just 5.2%.
HELLES LAGER
Helles means “light” in German, and Helicon’s version is just that: light, clean, and crisp. It’s the beer Brunetti recommends to craft beer newbies who are better acquainted with domestic macrobrewed lagers. And at 4.9 percent, it’s an anytime beer — which explains why it’s one of Helicon’s most popular offerings.
OATMEAL STOUT
Low-alcohol stouts can sometimes feel a bit thin. Brunetti uses 15 percent oats in the grain bill of his stout, which lends the beer body and viscosity despite clocking in just under 5 percent ABV. The roasted malts bring notes of cherries, chocolate and a touch of smoke, making it a great pairing with a rich dessert.
His crew, all of whom he’d worked with for years, nodded in agreement. “You don’t have to be the best, but you do have to be your best,” he says. “And usually, that’s enough.” That drive has served Gaucho well over the past four years. And it will continue to serve them as Falcon and his partners pursue further expansion. They are currently searching for a home for another location in the area, possibly in North Park or in Seven Springs. Falcon also has his eye on Cleveland and Columbus, and is considering obtaining a brewery license at some point (Gaucho is currently BYOB). And his ambitions don’t stop there. “I’m very comfortable with big cities. I’m not intimidated by that whatsoever,” Falcon says. So a Gaucho NYC or a Gaucho Philadelphia may not be too far off.
At one point in the evening, after a few courses and a few beers, the group had splintered off into separate conversations: standard dinner table talk about the weather, neighbors and past jobs. Falcon stood. “I’m gonna geek out real quick,” he announced, bringing the chatter to a temporary halt. He held up a slice of beef, a perfect pink rectangle ringed by a deep mahogany crust. He gushed about the quality of the meat, but even more about Clay, the new hire who was working the grill that night. And as Falcon stood there admiring the skewered steak like a proud papa, it became clear what makes Gaucho tick: a deep respect for good food, but an even stronger love for the people behind it Drew Cranisky is a writer and bartender based in Pittsburgh. When not drinking or serving beer, he can be found hosting a weekly trivia night or looking for the city’s best cheeseburger.
ABANDONED
PAIRINGS photographer and urban explorer @kristen_in_pgh pairs local breweries with abandoned and forgotten spaces in their respective neighborhoods.
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CraftPittsburgh.com
Beer BUSINESS CHRONICLES Words Jason Cercone
"This looks like fun. I'm going to open up a brewery, too!"
Who among us hasn't had this thought cross their mind at least once while consuming a few tasty beverages? I mean, it seems logical, right? You like beer. Other people like beer. This place where you drink beer is always crowded. You could open up a place, make good beer available, and the masses will instinctively flock! How hard could it be?
What is one thing you know now that you wish you had known when you opened Spoonwood Brewing? How much energy I would have to expend to maintain a positive mindset about the beer “industry” and “community.” It can be rough out there and today's social world makes it easy for people to say whatever they please, whether it be founded or unfounded. Seriously, there's a lot of B.S. How did you choose the Spoonwood concept and was there a clear direction for the beer and food programs prior to opening your doors? Both the food and beer menus continue to evolve, even as we approach our third anniversary. The plan was always to incorporate a full kitchen and wood-fired pizza oven, but to be honest, food was more of a secondary concern (for me) when we first opened. We have gained a better understanding of the importance of a fully developed food “program,” and the overriding goal is to keep food and beer on equal terms. What hasn’t changed is that our menu is wholly “from scratch,” incorporating as many fresh, local ingredients as possible. Beer is beer. James (Evans - Assistant Brewer) and I have fun making it and our hope is that people have fun drinking it. We'll continue to play with the recipes, we'll keep on brewing the beers that have brought us the most satisfaction, and we'll add to the lineup when inspirado strikes. How did you land on Bethel Park as the location for Spoonwood?
As consumers, what we see when we step foot in our favorite bar or brewery or taproom is the shiny, squeaky-clean, finished product. But masked beneath the wood trimmed bars, Edison lighting, exceptional liquids and carefully-planned food menus are years of blood, sweat, sacrifice, and unbridled dedication to bring a vision to stone-cold reality. All that and a boatload of money. And once that aforementioned reality hits, there's the ever-present grind to ensure standards are met or exceeded on multiple levels every single day.
Bethel Park wasn’t my choice, as the location was already a lock when I entered the picture. But it certainly was, and still is, a mostly untapped area, full of promise and rainbows.
And, if you don't have these aspirations, you'll learn what happens behind the scenes to deliver you an experience that keeps you coming back time and time again.
Bethel Park's Spoonwood Brewing
is rapidly approaching their third anniversary on Jan. 31. To celebrate, they'll be hosting a week's worth of fun events featuring live music, special food items, beer releases, and more (visit their website at spoonwoodbrewing.com and follow them on social media to stay current on what's going down). CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
Discover how Steve plays an integral part in the continuing growth and development of Spoonwood Brewing:
Very. Very freaking hard.
The contents of Beer Business Chronicles are not intended to discourage you from chasing a dream to own your own reputable craft beer destination. Quite the opposite. Its purpose is to paint a picture of realistic expectations and reveal some of the challenges and success stories these hardworking men and women tackle on a daily basis. After discovering some real-life experiences, you'll know whether starting a brewery or opening a bar is right for you.
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With three years nearly in the history books, Spoonwood Co-Owner and Head Brewer Steve Ilnicki has managed to keep everything in perspective. After chatting with him about how far his brewery has come and where it can go next, it's clear to see that Steve takes a pragmatic approach, understanding full well the beer industry keeps changing and evolving, forcing one to pivot at a moment's notice in order to keep the pace.
The Spoonwood brand continues to expand its reach throughout Pittsburgh with taps being found in close to 100 craft beer destinations throughout the city. In house, they've established a stellar beer and food program and have created a welcoming environment that has captivated citizens of the South Hills and beyond. Wood-fired pizzas and meats from Spoonwood's smoker complement a revolving tap list of IPAs, Belgian Ales, Stouts, and many more, including a healthy barrel-aged beer program that sees new releases every couple of months.
Tell us about a day in the life of a brewer and brewpub owner. The truth is, my workdays can be monotonous and mundane, but I very much enjoy what I do. I like routines, so brewing is a good fit. Every week, you can be certain that there will be tanks to clean, kegs to clean, draft lines to clean, grain bags to hoist, mash tuns to empty, and so on. But I get excited for every batch that we rack, even when it's a beer that we have brewed dozens of times before. What were some of the obstacles you had to overcome to get Spoonwood operational? We moved from breaking ground to opening day extremely quickly — a little more than half a year. The buildout was not without challenges, and the borough did present certain hoops to jump through. But all things considered, and knowing the struggles that many ventures face, it was a relatively smooth process. What is the greatest success you've experienced? There isn’t a single moment that stands out. I've met a lot of great people because of beer these past few years. There was that whole Claudio Sanchez thing, which was thrilling. I've had some great encounters with our Bethel Park “neighbors,” who are all so supportive of our brewpub. And making beer for the Turtle Survival Alliance each of the last two years. Any advice you'd like to impart to someone thinking about opening a brewery? Get very excited about hazy beer. Jason Cercone is the founder of Breaking Brews and is the executive director of Pittsburgh Libations Week. Learn more by visiting breakingbrews.com.
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have you tried...
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1. N ORTH COAST Old Stock Ale 2017
2. V ICTORY Mighty Things IPA
Fresh beer matters. Until the label of a beer bottled in 2017 says “Best by September 2033”. Then “Don’t Age Your Beer In Direct Sunlight” matters, I guess. Personally, I say drink everything fresher than not. Sure, at 12% alcohol by volume Old Stock can stand up to aging. But it doesn’t need it. The booze never punches you in the face fresh and the hop character is low enough you really don’t need that to mellow either. What I’m getting at here is that North Coast is just low-key cranking out a year-round malty masterpiece over here. Make no mistake, this a large beverage. But it’s velvety smooth, full of port wine soaked wood, musty cocoa and caramelized sugar flavors. My biggest complaint is the short finish. Everything evaporates off the palate seconds after you swallow and then you find yourself constantly raising your glass. Good stuff for cold winter nights.
The only thing more constant than change is the vocal minorities hottest takes about change. Take, for example, Victory’s Imperial IPA over the years. First came Hop Wallop and the people rejoiced in it’s bitter glory. And then came Yakima Glory during the Black IPA fad and the people were all, “Yes, this is good but DON’T YOU DARE CHANGE THE HOP WALLOPS!” And then DirtWolf came about and most of us were like, “OK this is some damn fine stuff, thank you!” And the vocal minority were all, “THE HOP WALLOPS, NO IT’S GONE!” And Victory said, “Here, have some Hop Ranch, better?” And some were. And now comes the Hop Ranch replacement and, man, are some people ticked off by that. I’ve enjoyed the evolution, not of the people, of the beer. Palates have shifted from bracing bitter and bone dry to soft bitterness, juicy and full of hop flavor, and Victory has followed step. Mighty Things is a facefull of dank tropical fruit and pine sap on a bed of soft fluffy wheat and oats. I remember proclaiming DirtWolf absolutely dangerous because of its drinkabiltily to ABV ratio and Might Things trumps that. Drink with caution.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
12% - Old Ale - northcoastbrewing.com
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Recommended if you like: East End - Gratitude, Four Seasons - Deconstruction, Anchor - Old Foghorn, Brew Gentlemen - III, Sole - Pain of Wisdom
8.3% - Imperial IPA - victorybrewing.com
Recommended if you like: Fat Head's - Hop Juju, Alpine - Pure Hoppiness,
Pizza Boy - Frontside Lipside, Roundabout - Humboldt Range, Helltown - Misfits & Misanthropes #5
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Words Hart Johnson Photo Tim Burns
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3. S CHMALTZ Funky Jewbelation 2016 Let’s be real for a minute or two here. I’m a dinosaur of this here craft beer movement. Twenty years of loving it and creeping on 18 years of selling it. If you told me in 2000 that a soured blend of seven different barrel-aged beers would be a thing that I could buy from an American brewery I would’ve laughed your ass back to Flanders. Silly noob. So, things change and the most Hebrewish, Hebrewistic? Hebrewlic? I’m sorry, I’m ignorant, but let’s just say Shmaltz takes Hebrewism more seriously than I take these reviews. So, anyway, this is a blend of Jewbelation 19, Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A., Death Hoppy Black Ale, Rejewvenator ‘14, Bock Bock, Messiah Nut Brown Ale and Origin Pomegranate Strong Ale. L’Chaim Sucka some of which were aged in bourbon barrels, others in rye, and somewhere the sour happened also. Complexity yo. This a monster of flavors, bourbon and oak tannins crashing into espresso cherry bon bons with port wine and balsamic vinegar soaked wood rounding out the finish. Recommended if you like: Rodenbach - Grand Cru, Draai Laag - Ragnarok, Cascade - Vlad The Imp Aler, Victory - Tart Ten, Blackberry Farms - Roasted Cherry Stout
CraftPittsburgh.com
9.4% - Blended Sour Ale - shmaltzbrewing.com
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4. Y ELLOW BRIDGE Not The Buttons Stout
7. F LYING FISH Jersey Juice IPA
This has to be a Pastry Stout, right? A gingerbread stout with gumdrops and muffins and little icing eyebrows added to the kettle? Right? I’ll be honest, I didn’t ask and them cats out in Delmont are just doing their thing and barely telling anyone on the internet about the things they’re doing. I think you have to be a brother’s sister’s cousin twice removed to find out about their canned releases. That or follow them on Instagram. Either way it’s way difficult. I’m going with definitely spiced, candied ginger hits you right in the nose and again lingers on the palate. Really picking up on the little icing eyebrows about mid palate with some sweetness to balance out the big dark chocolate maltiness. Really getting the muffin notes on the finish, not so much lemon poppy seed, but more of an apple walnut muffin that place nicely with the earthy tea like hop notes. Really looking forward to the gum drop barrel aged version.
2017, the year Hazy IPA broke. 2018, the year Hazy IPA breaks the beer industry. As much fun as it’s been for the last year, watching all these older guard breweries rabble rabble about Hazy IPA stole my baby and Hazy IPA won’t clean your sidewalk after a heavy snow, I’m really gonna enjoy the next few months of breweries taking a bite out of Hazy IPA like a Shelbyvillian taking a bite out of a lemon. But in the end, we the consumers are changing the beer industry at a rapid pace, the 22-oz. bottle is pretty much dead, 16-oz. cans are the new hotness and we want our IPA soft and cuddly now. Flying Fish, who’s been doing the beer thing in New Jersey since 1995, caught onto the trend a few months ago with this juicy IPA that’s light on the hop bitterness but full of juicy candied lemon, ripe peach and paw paw fruit. True to the style of your favorite local Hazy IPA, this stuff is incredibly drinkable. And I bought a 4-pack of pounders of this stuff for like $12 at a gas station. There was a line though, couple people were buying lottery tickets.
9.5% - Imperial Stout - yellowbridgebrewing.com
Recommended if you like: Hitchhiker - Implement of Destruction Stout, Thirsty Dog - Siberian Night Stout, Mikkeller - Black, Brooklyn - Black Chocolate Stout
5. G REAT LAKES Blackout Stout
6% - Unfiltered IPA - flyingfish.com
Recommended if you like: Stillwater - The Cloud IPA, Sierra Nevada - Hazy Holidays, Heavy Seas - Alpha Effect, Dancing Gnome - OBB
9.9% - Imperial Stout - greatlakesbrewing.com
Imperial Stout puns, almost as bad as hop puns or worse? “Bold and dark as a power-less metropolis”, yeah we get it Great Lakes your Stout is full of stout. How “bold” is a city without power anyway? Since a good half of the beers this issue are all about my favorites to deal with Pittsburgh winter, you can’t leave off one of the OGRAISYCAPWSIALDITCFT*. Brewed since 2003, I laughably enjoy the 7-month shelf life printed on every label and, yes, I know I said drink everything fresh but I heartily endorse aging Blackout somewhere cold and dark for a year or two. Fresh, it’s full of loads of fresh malt richness, toffee dredged in ground dark chocolate, sweet molasses and finishes with a lingering ripe fruit acidity not unlike Yirgacheffe coffee. With a little age, darker fruity notes will slowly tie the room together into a fudgy, dark chocolate masterpiece. *OG Readily Available Imperial Stout You Can Actually Purchase Without Standing In A Line Damn It’s Too Cold For That Recommended if you like: Grist House - Black in the USSR, Bells - Expedition Stout, Dark Horse - Plead the Fifth, Evil Twin - Even More Jesus Stout
6. S TILLWATER/OLIVER Whipped
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
8% - Nitro Imperial Chocolate Milk Stout stillwater-artisanal.com
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The logo of this can caught me like the 1973 CBS Special Presentation logo, just spinning at me telling me the next 30 commercially interrupted minutes of my life are gonna have a profound impact on my life. Man if you think that sounds weird, wait’ll you get a load of this beer. Stillwater is a gyspy brewer, no brewery to call their own, just finding space in other breweries to make their beer. Oliver Brewing is the Pratt Street Alehouse people for those of you who are Baltimore woke. I had no idea Oliver was even packaging let alone diving into the nitro pour scientology. Look, you can explain how to nitrogenate a beer to me all you want, it’s underpants on your head magic and I’ll never be convinced otherwise. Whipped is decadent, flourless. dark chocolate cake, topped with whipped cream and smacked in the face with a handful of French roast coffee beans. I don’t advocate for nitro beers very often but I’d advocate this a Top 5 application of that magic. Recommended if you like: Voodoo - Cowbell, Avery - Vanilla Bean Stout, Great Divide - Velvet Yeti Nitro, Noble Stein Sweet - Oak Stout
@ MOARHOPS
Recommended if you like: Pittsburgh, beer, bicycles, curmudgeons, clean draft lines, retweets, dogs, Wade Boggs stories, whiskey, South Side observations, memes, obscure Simpsons quotes.
BEER
MAIL! (KIND OF)
SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE FINALLY AVAILABLE. CRAFTPITTSBURGH.COM
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CraftPittsburgh.com
brewer sit-down
PAUL SCHNEIDER Cinderlands Beer Co. - Lawrenceville Age 31
Hometown?
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and bounced around a bunch.
What’s your brewing background?
I started home brewing about eight years ago. And that led to me starting a craft beer blog about Chicago’s craft beer scene. And then I worked my way into a position at Solemn Oath Brewery in Naperville, Ill, where I was for five and a half years. While Production Manager at Solemn Oath, we were making about 8,000 barrels of beer, we had a taproom, a canning line and a pretty big barrel-aging program.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
I was a high school history teacher when I got into home brewing. That was the career path I was on, but I I wanted to take a stab at pursuing my passion as a career. I wasn't at the point yet where I had reached tenure and had those nice salary steps, gotten married – all the things that can kind of get you set in one place. I’m happy it worked out.
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Do you remember your first craft beer?
My eye-opening beer was Goose Island Matilda. It’s a pretty wacky beer for your first wake up to the beer world. But I had been going to the Goose Island pub after Cubs games, they had one up in Wrigleyville at the time, and we would drink 312s and IPAs and stuff, but I didn’t even know about the Belgian beers they made or the barrel-aged beers that they had and it was just kind of by chance. My best friend, who also was a brewer for a little while in Portland, Ore., he ended up chatting up the bartender. He’s
a talkative dude, likes making friends, he came back grinning with this chalice of Matilda. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen at that time. The gold rim, this gothic gold ‘M’ on it, poured with a crazy big head…I tasted that and it was like a revelation.
Do you have a guilty pleasure beer?
I don’t know if you’ll accept this answer, but I’d have to say tequila. I love tequila and you put a little citrus with that and I’m happy. I like drinking beer a lot, but if it’s not something I’m interested in then I’m typically going to something else.
Do you brew to any music?
I’m always playing music. I believe music died around 1975 and nobody’s played anything worth a damn since then pretty much. Allman Brothers Band, the Band, Clapton, that kind of stuff is my jam. All the time.
Favorite PGH bar yet?
I’ve only been here two months. So the brewpub and home? But I’ve had some great experiences at bars. I think Allegheny Wine Mixer is my favorite joint I’ve been to so far. Where else can you go in and say ‘Do you have a funky Croatian white?’ and they’re like ‘Yes, I have three.’
If you weren’t brewing?
I loved teaching, but I got really hooked on the outdoors about 5 years ago, I’ve been traveling out west to the mountains as much as I possibly can. If I could do anything I’d be some kind of conservationist, writing or photographing landscapes and species that are threatened.
What do you drive?
Mazda 3, little hatchback, fuel efficient. I have a bike rack on top and I don’t have to get a stepladder to get my bike up. Subaru Outback is coming up next, though.
Death row beer?
I’d take like a peach beer from De Garde. They make so many I’m not sure what the name of a particular one is, I know I’ve had some that are fantastic. Their wild ale with peach is out of this world, that’s exactly what I’m looking for in a beer.
If you could go back to any place or time in your life and have a beer, where would it be?
I think it would probably have to be the first time I went down to Jester King. That place is everything I’m looking for in a brewery. The rural setting, dedication to the idea behind the beer, the quality and the uniqueness of the beer, the whole package. The people there were great. A lot of the people that I met there at that time have kind of moved on to other things. But that rural setting, commitment to agriculture and wild fermentation and spontaneity and unpredictably of brewing with an evolving mixed house culture. And seeing it all in action was pretty awesome. I’d share that with my wife. She’s my best friend, we love traveling together and we love beer.
Brewing heroes?
CraftPittsburgh.com
This may be a little unconventional, but my brewing hero is my best friend’s father in-law, Pete Domdey. He’s the home brew Swamy who taught me the early steps of brewing at home. So I probably never would have gotten into it without him showing my best friend how to brew and him passing that along to me. He owned a home brew shop in Chicago in the ‘90s, there was a little bit of a wave of home brewing kicking up then that kind of died off. He got back into his regular career after it died down, but he kept the gear, kept the passion. What I love about this guy, he’s a generation older than me but he’s got a boyish enthusiasm about beer. He has a big, beaming smile on his face when he’s sharing his beer and talking about what he’s brewing. That kind of excitement absolutely gets me going.
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cooking with beer Words Mindy Heisler-Johnson Photos MikeWeiss
Chicken Hunter’s Stew AND Cheddar Biscuits
I CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
feel like chicken gets the short end of the stick, unfairly, when it comes to stew. It just isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Unlike it’s red meat friends, chicken doesn’t take hours to cook, less than an hour for bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and chicken thigh meat in an hour is just as tender and perfect as beef in 4-6 hours. I like that math, especially on a school night.
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Not all chicken is created equal — this and recipes like it are not designed for chicken breasts. White meat chicken, breast meat, is meant to be cooked until done, briefly rested and then served — it is how they are their most tender and delicious to eat. Cooking to death (overcooking), even in liquid, equals dry and chewy. The meat wants to shred and it is just, well, unpleasant. So don’t do that. Chicken thighs, on the other hand, love to be slowly simmered (or roasted, or grilled). They absorb flavor, get more tender as they go and as an added bonus create their own stock while they simmer away, enriching your sauce or soup. I will allow for the substitution of boneless skinless thighs if you’d rather not deal with the picking, but it really is notably better with chicken cooked on the bone.
My goal was a One-Pot meal, doable on a school night, that tasted & looked like a feast. Chicken Hunter’s Stew—loaded with veggies, simmered in Brooklyn Winter Ale and topped with Bells Winter White Cheddar Biscuits. Brooklyn Winter is malty, very mildly spiced and perfect as the backbone for our gravy. The Bells Winter is the perfect pairing to make some beer bread-style cheddar drop biscuits that straddle the line between biscuit and tender dumpling. All easily doable after work with minimal dishes. It need not be a Sunday in order to eat like one!
Brooklyn Winter Chicken Hunter’s Stew • 8 pack bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs • Salt & pepper • 6 slices thick sliced bacon, diced • 1 large Spanish onion, medium dice • 4 medium/large carrots, medium dice • 4 ribs celery, medium dice • 3 or 4 cloves garlic, smashed & chopped • 1 Tbsp Herbs de Provence or dried thyme • 2 bay leaves
• A lot of fresh ground black pepper • Kosher salt • 12oz bottle Brooklyn Winter Ale • 1 quart chicken stock • 1 large sweet potato, peeled & medium diced • 2-3 regular potatoes, scrubbed & medium diced • 2-3 cups frozen peas • 1 cup heavy cream • 3 Tbsp Dijon mustard • ¼ cup cornstarch/water slurry if needed Heat your very favorite Dutch oven pot over medium high heat, add a drizzle of olive oil and let it get hot. Season the thighs on both sides with salt and pepper. Sear in two batches, until the skin is crisp and the fat is rendered out. Remove from the pot and set on the side to go back in later. While the chicken is rendering down cut your bacon and do your veggie prep. When the chickens are all done get the bacon in there and render it until it is crisp over medium heat. When it’s all crisp and perfect up your heat a bit and go in with your onion, carrot and celery—saute for a few minutes, letting the onion loose that raw smell then add the garlic. Continue to saute until the onions are softened and the garlic starts to smell sweet. Season with salt and a generous amount of black pepper. Add the herbs and bay leaf and cook for another couple minutes. Deglaze your pot with the bottle of Brooklyn, scrape all the awesome from the bottom while the beer reduces by half. Add the stock and thighs. Bring back up to a simmer and cover. It can stay on the stove at this point or go into a heated 350° oven. Let it cook for 30-45 minutes. When the chicken is well cooked remove the lid and get back onto a medium burner. Use a slotted spoon to remove the chickens and all their parts from the stew and set on a plate to cool a bit to be shredded up. Add the cream, mustard and peas. Bring the stew to a simmer and taste. Adjust your seasoning and thicken with the slurry and cook out for a couple minutes. Crank your oven to 400°. Mix up the biscuit dough while the chicken chills out a bit. Then shred the chicken, discarding all bones, skin and funky stuff. Put the shredded meat back into the pot and stir it up. Top the stew with drop biscuits, 10-12 of them, right on top of the stew to mostly cover the top. Get the pot back into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the biscuit top is golden brown and cooked through. Brush the biscuit top with melted butter when they come out and serve to hungry people immediately. The leftovers are also bomb heated up in the oven covered with some foil.
Bell's Winter White Cheddar Biscuits
Grown up version of RL Cheddar Biscuits. Can also be baked on the side as drop biscuits. Or rolled and cut like regular biscuits, though the dough will need a tick more flour to do that easily. • 3 cups AP flour • 3 Tbsp baking powder • 3 tsp salt • 3 Tbsp sugar • 2 cups good, sharp shredded cheddar • ½ cup shredded asiago or parmesan • 1 Tbsp granulated garlic • 1 Tbsp dried basil or oregano • 2 Tbsp dried parsley • ¼ cup melted butter • 12oz bottle Bell’s Winter White Mix all the dry ingredients and the cheese in a bowl. Add the butter and beer and fold together with a spatula to make an ugly, lumpy, dry batter/ wet dough. Use spoons to drop in by ½-¾ cup sized blops on the stew or a parchment lined tray. Bake until done through and golden brown. Brush with melted butter, or garlic butter if you’re fancy, when out of the oven.
home brewing
Words Jack Smith Art Joe Mruk
NEW YEAR, NEW BREW STEP OUT OF YOUR BREWING COMFORT ZONE Like a one-year membership to the Jelly of the Month Club, homebrewing is the gift that keeps on giving the whole year. And here we are -- another new year. If you’re like me you’ve probably fallen into a brew-tine, brewing up the same styles of beer again and again. Maybe you usually brew malty, rich imperial stouts or sessionable English ales or nothing but NEIPA after NEIPA. Me? I tend to brew German lagers. It’s what I like to drink. Pilsner, schwarzbier, märzen, rauchbier -- it seems like all I brew. When I’m not brewing those, chances are I’m brewing a session IPA or blonde ale. I don’t venture much beyond that. The new year is a time for resolutions. Commitments to change. To improve. To turn over new leaves. Now, we all know you’re gonna stop going to the gym by March. You’ll get tired of salads and calorie counting before Valentine’s Day. And you’ll be back to eight hours of TV and 12 Diet Cokes a day even before the Christmas decorations are back in the attic. So why not resolve to do something you’ll stick to? Resolve to change up your brewing routine! If you’re an extract brewer, try your hand at all-grain brewing. If you only brew hoppy ales, aim to brew all the porter and stout styles. If you have never brewed a lager (or kolsch or steam beer), now’s the time! The cold weather can help you keep fermentation temps low if you don’t have active temperature control. Try some new processes: open fermentation, wood aging, decoction or step mashing, sour mashing. If you always use others’ recipes, learn to develop your own. Use the new year as a springboard into learning more about this great hobby and expanding your skill set.
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
My resolution is to brew beer styles that I typically ignore. For example, I almost never brew Belgian beers, and on the rare occasions that I do it’s usually the yellow ones -- saison or golden strong ale. I have brewed about 150 batches of beer and only once did I brew a Belgian dubbel -- from a recipe in a book. This year that will change, and I will start the year off brewing the recipe I have come up with below.
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Developing this recipe got me excited to learn more about the style. I read through many of the books available from Brewers Publications for inspiration and ideas: “Brewing Classic Styles” by Jamil Zainasheff, “Brewing Better Beer” and “Modern Homebrew Recipes” by Gordon Strong, “Designing Great Beers” by Ray Daniels, “Radical Brewing” by Randy Mosher, “Brew Like a Monk” by Stan Hieronymus and “Great Beers of Belgium” by the late, great beer hunter, Michael Jackson. What I found are a lot of published recipes for this style aren’t really true to style. Including the one I previously brewed, they tend to make judicious use
of various specialty grains for color and flavor. The Trappist and Abbey breweries, however, keep it much simpler -- typically just base malt, dark invert sugar and a hint of specialty malt. With this recipe, based on plenty of research, I’m off to brew something new to me. I’m excited to share this one. Look for it at a TRASH or TRUB meeting in 2018.
“Dubbel Dutch Sipper"
BELGIAN DUBBEL Batch Size: 5.25 gal. Boil Time:60 minutes OG: 1.070 FG: 1.013 ABV: 7.5% IBU: 23 SRM: 17 Difficulty: Simple
*Assuming 60% brewhouse efficiency
Grainbill
• 14 lbs Belgian Pilsner Malt • 1 lb Belgian Aromatic Malt • 1 lb D-90 Belgian Candi Syrup • 0.5 lb D-180 Belgian Candi Syrup Extract Brewers: Replace the Pilsner malt with 6 lbs of light DME plus 1 lb of table sugar. Use some table sugar instead of all DME to ensure the finished beer has the low final gravity and not-too-thick body this style is known for. (DME is made by mashing malted barley at a higher temperature that produces more body than our all-grain recipe calls for. Subbing in sugar for some of the DME balances things out a bit.) Steep the Aromatic malt in a muslin sack in 0.5 gallon of 150F water for 30 minutes, then add water, DME, table sugar, and candi syrup and boil as you typically do.
Hops
• 30 grams Styrian Goldings (5.5% AA) @ 60 min • 14 grams Styrian Goldings (5.5% AA) @ 15 min
Mash & Boil
A simple single infusion mash at a temperature that produces light body is all we need for this beer. Mash at 148F for 75 minutes. If you have the ability to do a mash out, by all means do. Perform your normal lauter and sparge process to collect you standard pre-boil volume for getting 5.25 gallons of wort into your fermenter. Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops at 60 and 15 minutes.
Yeast/Fermentation
There are a lot of Belgian yeast strains available. They all produce similaryet-different flavor profiles. If you really want to choose the “best” one, you probably should brew a bunch of Belgian beers and try them all. If you’re just starting out, however, the safe play is to choose one of the “Abbey” strains such as WYeast 1214 “Belgian Abbey Style Ale” or WLP550 “Belgian Ale Yeast.” Regardless of which you choose, avoid any advice you may receive from old timers about how to “make good Belgiums”. They may tell you to ferment hot -- as high as 80 or 90 degrees. Don’t. Do you want fusel alcohols and banana esters? Because that’s how you get fusel alcohols and banana esters. Just ferment a little warmer than you would for an American or English Ale. Try 68-70F. More importantly, make sure the fermenter warms up gradually throughout the fermentation. This ensures the yeast ferment the beer completely and clean up any by-products they produce early in the fermentation such as diacetyl and
acetaldehyde. Hold it at 68-70 for the first three days after pitching, then add heat or let it warm up to 76-78 and hold it there until fermentation completes. It should take about 10-14 days to be fully fermented. Oh, be sure to oxygenate the wort well prior to pitching, too. This is a big beer and you need a healthy fermentation. Spend the $50 and get yourself an O2 setup and give that wort two full minutes of oxygen. Be sure to make a proper-size yeast starter, too. Old-timers love to say underpitching really brings out the character in their “Belgiums”. “Just pour the vial right into the carboy!” Doing this brings out character, alright. Just not the kind you’d find in any of the great beers of Belgium!
Suggested Pairings
Given this beer’s complexity -- rich dried fruit flavors from the candi sugar and fermentation-derived fruity esters and spicy phenols -- plus a crisp, spritzy, dry, “digestible” finish, it pairs very well with both sweet and savory foods. You can enjoy it as a sipper with melanoidin-rich desserts such as spice cake with dulce de leche sauce, or have it with hearty, savory lamb stew. The umami-and-herb-laden meat and gravy will play perfectly off the rich maillard flavors of the beer. Of course, it’s a great beer for pairing with strong washed-rind cheeses. One of the Trappist breweries even produces a readily-available range of cheeses with the same label as their beer. A homebrewer since 2002, Jack Smith is a National BJCP Judge, a former president of the Three Rivers Alliance of Serious Homebrewers, and an active member of the Three Rivers Underground Brewers Follow him on Twitter @whenyeastattack
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Words & Illustration Mark Brewer
CraftPittsburgh | issue #35
New Beers Resolution
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Are you counting calories or did you make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight? If you did then you’re probably thinking of all the things that you’ll need to cut down on, including craft beer. Many of us tend to think that beer packs an excessive amount of calories. To some degree this is absolutely true. However, knowledge is power. Understanding which of your favorite craft beers you can still sip that won’t go to your hips means not having to completely abandon craft beer. As a rule of thumb, remember that more taste equals more calories. That doesn’t mean you have to drink tasteless beer. Craft brewers understand better than anyone that not all consumers are looking for beers with big flavor. Craft beer is the polar opposite of what large commercial breweries have been providing for a century. Because there is such a difference in the two, many consumers equate craft beer with weird and wild flavors, and large commercial beers as the gold standard. Years from now, most everyone will have learned that craft beer simply equates to a variety of tastes and includes healthier ingredients. Large, commercial beer is often brewed with lesser quality ingredients, which produces less taste. We should all know by now why it’s less expensive too. Just like kids laugh at rotary phones, we’ll all chuckle one day at our old school idea of what some thought beer should taste like. When choosing a craft beer with fewer calories consider lagers, saisons and pilsners as your go-to brews. You’ll find quality selections and frequently discover varieties of malts and hops that are locally grown. Lagers provide a more crisp, refreshing taste. Many times these beers provide a finish with notes of lemon, bread or malt. In addition, if you look hard enough you don’t always have to forego
the rich, chocolate stouts either. Perhaps you simply need to open up your pallet to different tastes. Say yes to a new favorite, lower calorie craft beer, and yes to drinking fewer four packs to help increase your six-pack. Personally speaking, I don’t have hips or abs, but I do practice healthy eating and drinking habits. I also relish the thought that imbibing in many of the lighter craft beers means less calories than that vodka cocktail I use to fool myself into drinking. Again, education is power. Know what you’re drinking! Drink what you want, and always consume in moderation. I added the calorie count on the following beers you can find at your local breweries and distributors. Here’s to your health and a new year!
Evil Twin Brewing Co. - Bikini Beer IPA (2.7% ABV – 12 oz. = 81 cal.)
Pours golden yellow. Thick head with short retention. Bouquet of tropical fruit, bread and hops. Flavors of pineapple and citrusy grapefruit with notes of cracker and malt. Good balance of sweetness and bitterness. Light body with medium carbonation. Finishes with a mild bitterness on the back end.
Brouwerij Lindemans - Framboise Lambic (2.5% ABV – 6 oz. = 81 cal.)
Pours a deep red burgundy color. Thin pink head with little retention. Smells of sweet raspberry fruit. Flavor is of strong raspberry fruit. It is both sweet and abundantly tart. Dry, medium body with lots of carbonation. Finishes with a subtle tickle from tartness and effervescence.
Brooklyn Brewing Co. - ½ Ale
Saison (3.4% ABV – 12 oz. = 103 cal.)
Pours a cloudy pale yellow color with a thin head. Subtle aroma of citrus and cereal grains once it reaches room temperature. Flavors of soda cracker, malt and lemongrass. Gentle malt base and soft in the mouth. Light body with moderate carbonation. Finishes with a slight peppery taste.
Sly Fox Brewing Co. - O’Reilly’s Stout
Irish Stout (3.6% ABV – 12 oz. = 108 cal.)
Pours a deep brown color with a light tan head. Aromas of malt and chocolate. Dry tasting with flavors of unsweetened chocolate and roasted malt. Light body and light carbonation. Finishes creamy with slightly lingering taste of roasted malt.