Abjuration Brewing Company’s Tom Glover ▲ and Dave Hallam ▼
THE DRINK ISSUE
HOP ON Pittsburgh’s craft-beer industry is booming, but can it find its place in the national beer scene? STORY BY DREW CRANISKY PHOTOS BY XAVIER THOMAS
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PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 11.15/11.22.2017
It
WAS THE LAST PLACE I’d expect to find a brewery.
On a sunny Thursday afternoon in late October, I found myself staring at the front of a movie theater in McKees Rocks. There was no sweet smell of cooking grain, no truck beds loaded with kegs, no signs at all that there was any brewing (or anything at all, really) going on within. But this was the address I had, so I headed around the back of the building and knocked. Tom Glover greeted me with a broad smile and ushered me in, and there it was: Abjuration Brewing Company. On the former stage of the historic Parkway Theatre, Glover and his partner, Dave Hallam, were brewing up a dry-hopped American blond ale. The beer was one of the earliest batches from their brand-new system, which they will use to brew experimental, open-sourced ales on an extremely small scale. Glover excitedly showed me around, pointing out all the triumphs and quirks of their largely DIY space. What was once a basement hobby is now a buzzing, bubbling brewery. From tiny startups like Abjuration to established, seasoned operations, Pittsburgh is chock-full of breweries. But it wasn’t always that way. Penn Brewery opened the doors to its North Side brewpub in 1989, becoming Pittsburgh’s first true craft