Friends:
With great pleasure, we’d like to share with you our latest project. Over the last six months, we’ve quietly been working on our biggest expansion to date, a brewery. And now, with our first beer ready to go (and with a second not far behind it), it’s our pleasure to introduce you to Golden Age Beer Company. And this Friday, our first beer, Golden Age Pale Ale, will go on tap at both the Independent and Lorelei.
Golden Age is located in Homestead, a community whose resilience and rebirth we have admired for years from just across the Monongahela River, and a community that we hope to join and support by creating jobs, opening an inclusive and accessible space, and maintaining and repurposing a beautiful historic property. Golden Age will take the place of the former Enix Brewing, which closed in 2019. Our predecessors in this space took a huge risk, and created a space with strong and beautiful bones. They graciously left us in a tremendous starting position, and we are thankful for their help and support in transitioning the space and the brewhouse to us.
We will be reopening that space soon, not just with a different name, but with a different concept. As faithful supporters of Lorelei and the Independent well know, our passion in recent years has taken a deeper focus on lager in all of its glorious forms. From crisp Northern German and fragrant Italian-style pilsners to luxurious dunkels and Franconian rauchbiers to the easy-drinking, “lawn-mower-beer” American lagers, we believe that, with their clean, subtle and eminently-drinkable finesse, lagers are the beers that bring people together, that cross divides, and that are both the past and the future of beer. We want to bring a brewery that makes lager its primary focus to Pittsburgh and more particularly, to Homestead. Indeed, we believe that to do anything else would be an injustice to this community’s hard-working, steely heritage and resolve. When this community rose up in 1892 to rebuff a barge full of armed Pinkertons, it was fueled by Homestead-brewed lager, while the very brewers who crafted that lager stood in solidarity with their steel-worker brethren on the banks of the Monongahela. We hope that we can stand in solidarity with this community once more as it continues on its path to a new golden age.
Our brewhouse is well-equipped to produce the finest lagers. We are fortunate to have inherited a state-of-the-art 15 barrel BrauKon brewing system. Bavarian-made and designed to manufacture the world’s most precise beer styles, this system will provide our brewing team with the tools it needs to walk the tightrope to make perfect lager, which is defined nearly as much by its absence of imperfections as it is by its pursuit of perfection. In what feels like a meeting driven by fate itself, we were fortunate to find a head brewer who is up to the challenge of working with a system that has a lofty reputation for precision and finesse.
Head Brewer Aaron Dahl joined us in August to oversee the transition of the brewhouse and begin working on recipe development. Aaron joins us from Chicago’s Alarmist Brewing, where, over the last six years, he has been the head brewer. He is too modest to champion his own accomplishments, but we will not spare them in our introduction. In the past several years, Aaron has earned three medals in the Great American Beer Festival: in 2018, the Gold Medal in the Hazy IPA category for “Le Jus;” in 2020, the Bronze Medal for the Pale Ale category for “Pantsless Pale Ale;” and, in 2021, the Bronze Medal in the American Lager category for “Midwest Royalty.” He has dedicated his professional life to beer. And while he can produce some of the best IPAs and pale ales in the country, over the past several years, his passion -- like ours -- has turned towards lagers, and he is excited to join us in a brewhouse that is dedicated to and designed for the same passion.
Hop heads, fear not -- this brewery will not exclude you (or anyone), and, indeed our inaugural batch of beer was a Pale Ale. While our draft list offerings will ultimately be lager-forward, we’ll always have an IPA or a Pale Ale on tap. Moreover, with Aaron’s well-demonstrated acumen in brewing those styles behind us, we assure you that it will be a good one. And for those of you who love the Independent, Hidden Harbor, and Lorelei for our cocktails, we want you to know that we will cater to your tastes too. Along with the brewery, we also acquired a full restaurant liquor license, allowing us to serve the entire world of spirits, wines and cocktails (and also any beers from international, in-state or out-of-state breweries that we admire and think would compliment our lager focus). There was one person in town that we believed had the “triple-threat” ability to run such an ambitious bar program, and that was Jamie Lesh. Many of you will remember Jamie from behind the bar at Hidden Harbor. He also has been regularly behind the stick at the Independent, where he served as our interim head bartender while he awaited the opening of Golden Age. And, in between, he worked with our good friends at Cinderlands Brewing in the Strip. He will now work as our Bar Manager at Golden Age, where we believe he is uniquely positioned to run a tap room cocktail program that will not simply be an afterthought.
Similarly, Maddie Burton, who has served for the last six months as our General Manager on Shady Avenue, curating wines for the Independent as well as Lorelei, will put together a wine program that will focus on wines that derive from the same European traditions and philosophies as the beers that we intend to brew. Maddie also intends to select wines with similar production techniques as beer, and you can expect to see wines that complement our draft list and that will serve as gateways to wine for the stalwart beer drinker and beer for the stalwart wine drinker.
So when will Golden Age open its tap room? As we complete some interior renovations, you can expect to see us open outdoors in our adjacent beer garden on a limited, weekend pop-up basis soon. The beer garden has ample seating and a stage, and we hope to bring some fire pits and music to the neighborhood in the waning weeks of autumn. To stay up to date on those specific dates and hours, please follow our Instagram page where we will announce them. In the meantime, Golden Age beers are going to start hitting the draft lists at the Independent and Lorelei, starting this Friday with Golden Age Pale Ale, an all-Citra hopped -- and crystal clear -- 5.2% abv American Pale Ale designed to be an instant, quaffable classic and frequent instalment on both draft lists.
For those of you more excited by our dedication to lager styles (which, by their very nature, will take a little bit longer for us to turn around), stay tuned, because we will be releasing our first Kölsch-style beer soon. Our first true lagers -- including our first Pilsner -- will likely wait until we open our tap room.
Finally, why the name? Well, we started the Independent Brewing Company nearly eight years ago, with a terrible, terrible name. As we quickly learned, a name that includes “Brewing Company” for a place that does not in fact brew beer is a confusing one, no matter how viable our tedious metaphor to a long-extinct, similarly-conceived company with the same name was. So now, you may be wondering, why have we refused the unique (one may say “golden”) opportunity to cure that original sin, having recently acquired a fully-operational brewery just across the river in Homestead?
We considered using the “Independent Brewing Company” for the brewery. That opportunity felt even more appealing as the aforementioned Homestead brewery that served lager during the “Battle of Homestead” was actually a member of the original Independent Brewing Company association of breweries. But fundamentally, the Independent and all of the emotion and passion and feeling that we have all put into it as owners, employees and guests alike needs to be its own thing in its own place. Golden Age beers will of course be well represented there. But so will beers from our friends at Roundabout, Old Thunder, Grist House, East End, Dancing Gnome, Cinderlands, Brew Gentlemen and so many other local friends and favorites (as well as, naturally, beers from our national and international friends at places like O.E.C., Einbecker, Reissdorf, B.F.M., and Allagash).
The name “Golden Age” felt right to us for a number of reasons. It’s a description that has the unique ability to celebrate the past, enjoy the present, and look towards the future. We believe that the Golden Ages of Homestead, of lager, of craft beer, and of Pittsburgh are not behind us but indeed remain ahead of us, as we strive for a more sustainable and inclusive culture and economy. And we believe the same for our company and for the food and beverage industries at large. After a difficult year for our restaurants, Adam, Matt and I shared a dedication to emerging with something more -- something that would make it all worth it. It helped us maintain our resilience in our darkest hours. We believe that this brewery can help usher in a badly-needed Golden Age for our staff and our communities, and we have humbly set out to try to realize that dream.
With love,
Pete
