Beer Here: American Craft Beer Week, May 16-22
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Clockwise from top: Penn Brewery's Penndemonium, a golden lager fest made in spring; Full Pint?s Chinookie India pale ale. Voodoo Brewery's 4 Seasons India pale ale, which subtly changes four times a year; East End Brewing?s Homewood Reserve, its Blackstrap Stout aged in bourbon barrels; Erie Brewing's Railbender Ale, a Scottish-style ale; Rock Bottom's Restaurant & Brewery's Das Gut Dopplebock; and Church Brew Works' Celestial Gold, a pilsner-style lager.
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Over the past two decades, a revolution has swept Pittsburgh and the rest of the country and transformed the landscape of beer.
By the early 1980s, Americans had gotten to a place where most of us drank pretty much the same type of lager beer, if not also the same brands.
Today, there are so many different types of beers available, from so many different brewers, that it can boggle the mind.
Just go into a better beer bar or bottle shop and gaze into the coolers at beers of every description, from every state.
Even if you drank only brews made in Western Pennsylvania, you technically could have a different beer every night for most of a year. True, some are available only seasonally, sometimes for a very brief time, and on draft rather than in bottles, at the places that brew them.
You might call them "microbrews," but size has less to do with it than spirit. As the Brewers Association defines them, craft brewers tend to be small, but BA rules allow them to make up to 6 million barrels of beer a year. The trade group requires that craft brewers be independent -- that is, less than a quarter owned or controlled by another entity. The group also says craft brewers are traditional, having either a flagship beer that is all malt and no adjuncts such as corn, or has at least half of its volume in either all-malt beers or in beers that use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.
But more than 300 different brews are made by the four craft brewers in Pittsburgh proper -- Penn Brewery (North Side), the Church Brew Works (Lawrenceville), East End Brewing Co. (Homewood) and the Hofbrauhaus (South Side) -- and the craft brewers outside the city: Rock Bottom in Homestead; Rivertowne Pour House in Monroeville; Full Pint in North Huntingdon; Beaver Brewing near Beaver Falls; North Country in Slippery Rock; Sprague Farm & Brew Works in Venango, Crawford Country; Voodoo Brewery in Meadville, Crawford County; Blue Canoe in Titusville, Crawford County; and way up north, the Brewerie, Erie Brewing and Lavery Brewing in Erie.
The small brewpubs tend to make the most varieties, in smaller amounts. Rivertowne's Andrew Maxwell can't even count all the different brews they made there, because, while they always have on tap an astonishing 18 house brews in 26 styles, they're always varying the styles. "For instance, [in] American fruit beer style, we offered seven different types of fruit," he says. "I am guessing we actually did a little over 70 different beers last year. We brewed 163 times."
First Published May 19, 2011 12:00 am
