Iron City Has Come a Long Way!

When the Italian Sons and Daughters of America said they were going on a tour of the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, I wasn’t totally sold. I’m a wine drinker, but since this group is so nice and so much fun, I thought, what the heck, I’ll go.

I envisioned a cavernous space that smelled like the basements of fraternity houses I frequented in my college years. That conjured up the scent of stale beer and a few other odors that shall remain undescribed because some college memories are better left shrouded in mystery.

I was so wrong!

The Iron City Brewery is state of the art! It’s huge, absolutely gorgeous, and you could eat off the floor (not that I recommend that sort of thing) but it was that clean! And it’s a distillery as well where they’re making whiskey! Who knew?

The brewery is in the old PPG Industries Works #1 Glass plant. The walls are all old bricks that have been refurbished, and it looks totally cool. The giant stainless steel containers dwarf everything in sight and the conveyer belts moving everything so smoothly make it so very efficient, it’s really quite impressive.

They have displays out showing the different grains they make whiskey from and you can see the barrels have different degrees of charring to make the different whiskeys taste like…well…different whiskeys.

There is so much chemistry involved in making beer, spirits, wine, etc. you really have to give these folks credit. They were clearly not goofing off at fraternity parties in college like some people.

We heard from one of the master distillers who got so excited talking about the chemistry involved, it was really wonderful to see. If high school chemistry had included distilling class, I think I would have gotten much better grades.

Apparently, the owner of Pittsburgh Brewing, Cliff Forest, a Pittsburgher, purchased the company from New York investors in 2018 to bring it back under local control. I hope the investments he’s made to improve efficiency and take Pittsburgh Brewing to the next level do the trick.

We were treated like royalty. The President of the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, Todd Zwicker, led our tour and couldn’t have been nicer. He answered all our questions, showed us around almost everywhere and even poured us beers at the end of the tour!

Yes, you get to drink free beer at the end of the tour! If you want to book a tour, just click here! I can just hear a stampede of fingers hitting that just click here hyperlink.

Even a non-beer drinker like me truly enjoyed the IC light I drank. It was refreshing, clean tasting, and delicious.

And if you’re worried about Iron City running out of beer in the future, fear not, just look below and I think you’ll see…we’re in good shape for a while.

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Bottoms up!