Pittsburgh - New Beers & Local Breweries

Good to see Caution! Hope I can manage to snag one this year.

 

I was at roundabout the other day and had 3 great beers and a pie for $20. This batch of hyer-pa with pacific gem and citra was the best so far. The pumpkin stout is tasty and not overwhelmingly spicy. And the 6% barrel aged stout drinks like a much higher abv beer. Again, I don't think you can ask for much more from small neighborhood brewery. It's not like they have any room for hundreds of oak barrels.

 

To play devil's advocate to that, how is BG then putting Mexican Coffee into barrels for a year? Are they not a small, neighborhood brewery as well?

Draai Laag also bought what looked like about a hundred barrels a few months back.

 

I haven't been to BG so I don't know how much space they have. Roundabout has room for a handful of barrels. They're not going to be able to churn out a significant quantity of barrel aged beers every month. They do have them sporadically and thats the best I think one could expect from a small spot.

DL has a separate spot (production maybe?) out in Hampton somewhere. How the hell could they fit a hundred barrels in that tiny building in millvale?

 

I guess my point was more that if BG and DL can find a way to have that space, Roundabout could probably do it too.

But maybe they don't want that and there's nothing wrong with that if that's the case.

 

No doubt each brewery faces limitations, many based upon their available resources (talent and creativity aside). But, independent of anything specific to Roundabout, it sounds excusey to blame size for lack of better beers. Could not other small breweries potentially brew better hoppy beers, if they had the hop contracts that larger breweries have, which give them access to hops (sought after varietals and straight up quantity) that others could only wish for? BG, in spite of its size, puts out many delicious and hoppy beers--better than many larger breweries with contracts.

 

This thread is full of speculation.

 

Oh we're full of a lot more than speculation.

 

I don't think anyone said anything about barrels. Most of the talk has centered around their obsession with low abv beers. There's nothing wrong with that but most of us are looking for a higher gravity stout than 6%. That's a waste of ingredients at that point.

 

so excited

 

Facts aren't as fun to talk about man.

 

I wasn't commenting with regard to quality but the quantity of barrel aged beers a small brewery can produce. There is a prevailing attitude on this site that breweries are judged by limited release barrel aged beers but that simply isn't in the business model of a lot of small breweries (or likely profitable for that matter). I don't think that the lack of a barrel program by any means should be a metric by which to judge a small brewery. In that vein, I'm sure we've all had plenty of poor barrel aged beers as well.

 

Just last week, in Morgantown.

 

To be fair, the "facts" that we have to deal from are usually faaaaairly limited. If this thread were only used for the dissemination of facts, it would be about 8 pages long.

 

Fact: yinz are jagoffs

 

reported...only speculation allowed up in here...

 

Just saw Double Dose will be on draft at Piper's. Not sure when.

 

Speculation: There will be a minor shitstorm when someone posts about the DL release tonight.

 

Are they sold out yet?

 

The fresh hop CPA from BG is sooo tasty. The new Nelson Pale and Mr Automatic were both really good as well.