Dancing Gnome Brewing Company, the hop-forward brewery and taproom Andrew Witchey opened on the outskirts of Pittsburgh last year, sprang from the desire to help grow craft brewing’s culture in Pennsylvania.
What sets Ohio-based brewery Fat Head’s apart from its peers is its winning streak at the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup. Since the original brewery opened, it has collected 25 medals between the two competitions across a wide range of styles.
At Draai Laag’s brewhouse in western Pennsylvania, Dennis R. Hock embraces the wild critters floating through the air to create beers that could only come from Pittsburgh.
Easily assembled without tools or glue by snapping the pieces together, the PuzzlePax also can be disassembled for flat storage, making it perfect for keeping in a car or messenger bag when heading to the local bottle shop.
Pittsburgh has always been a brewing town. Not unlike a great many other US cities, much of its original brewing culture came from an influx of immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, who congregated in tight-knit neighborhoods and adapted their traditional brewing practices to our shores.
It’s difficult to quantify the effect breweries have on their neighborhoods. But there’s no doubt that breweries are a part of the positive feedback loop that leads to neighborhood development.
For Scott Smith, drinking good beer led to brewing it at home, and making 5-gallon batches in the kitchen ended in Smith quitting his job, emptying his savings account and opening East End Brewing, a production brewery in a dilapidated Pittsburgh warehouse.
Beer Wars reaches the Big Screen; South Carolina microbrewers fight for their right to sell; Penn Brewery staying home; Possible Texas plan to allow buying beer direct from brewers; A tale of two Budweisers; and homebrewing legalized in Utah.
A crop of serious young brewers and a mammoth lineup of bars boasting huge craft beer selections, modest prices and liberal liquor laws that let bars serve bottles and mini-kegs to go, and you’ve got, perhaps surprisingly, one of the country’s best beer towns.
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