Last week I spent a few days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. What I found there was a city on the rise, a city in the middle of an economic renaissance, a city where good things (lots of them) are happening. The steel industry has gone of course and the city is re-configuring its economy around a more diversified set of sectors including healthcare, higher education, and financial services. By 1910 Pittsburgh was producing more than 60% of the nation’s steel. In 1957 43% of the region’s manufacturing jobs were in the steel industry. But foreign competition in the 1980s dealt a body blow to the city’s steel industry and by the end of the decade 74% of Pittsburgh’s steel mills had closed. Today there are no steel mills within Pittsburgh’s city limits. But Google are in Pittsburgh, as are Apple, Intel, RAND, Uber and a host of  other high profile and high-technology companies. The city is rapidly emerging as a center of innovation and creativity. While there I had the opportunity to be in the same room as Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto and listened to him talk with enthusiasm and excitement about the renewed vibrancy that the city and its economy are experiencing.

Just as the Pittsburgh economy has changed over the decades so has its brewing industry. It is a city with a rich brewing history. Brewing arrived there in 1765 when British soldiers established a brewery at Fort Pitt. In 1895 the Pittsburgh Business Directory reported that there were around 30 breweries in the Pittsburgh area. These included the Iron City Brewing Company,  established in 1861 (the same year that Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President) by Edward Frauenheim, a young German immigrant. In 1886 the brewery relocated from its original site to a new one on Liberty Avenue in the city’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. In 1899 Iron City Brewing Company along with 20 other breweries (11 in Pittsburgh and 9 in outlying areas) were brought together under one umbrella to form the Pittsburgh Brewing Company (PBC). Achieving economies of scale was the driving force behind this move. With its very creation  Pittsburgh Brewing Company became the third largest brewing company in the United States. In the ensuing years, however, one by one, the breweries under the PBC umbrella closed. By the mid-1980s Iron City Brewery was the only one of the original 21 PBC breweries still operating. The 1980s also witnessed the beginnings of a number of ownership changes for the company. In 1986 PBC was acquired by Bond Holdings of Perth in Western Australia. Ownership changed hands two more times before 2005, the year that the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2007 PBC was purchased and brought out of bankruptcy by Unified Growth Partners, a private equity firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut.

In 2009 Iron City’s 148 year association with the city came to an abrupt end. Owners, Unified Growth Partners,  moved production 40 miles down the road to La Trobe, Pennsylvania. La Trobe, of course, is famous in the beer world as the city that brewed Rolling Rock beer. Rolling Rock is no longer brewed in La Trobe. Production was moved to New Jersey back in 2006 after the Rolling Rock brand was sold to Anhueser Busch. This left a vacant brewing facility in La Trobe. In 2006 the La Trobe brewery was purchased by City Brewing from La Crosse, Wisconsin. City Brewing now brews Iron City beer in its La Trobe facility – a practice known in the industry as contract brewing. In 2011 the Iron City brand was purchased by Uni-World Capital, a private equity firm, based in New York City. Uni-World specializes in leverage buy-outs and growth equity investments in lower middle-market companies in  industries ranging from telecommunications to healthcare.

Today, Pittsburgh Brewing Company is a shell of its former self. A company that once had a stable of 21 breweries is reduced to no breweries and six beers (Iron City, Iron City Lite, Iron City Lite Mango, Old German, American, and American Light) all produced under contract. In the mid-1990s Pittsburgh Brewing Company produced around a million barrels of beer. Today it brews (or has City Brewing brew for it) under 90,000 barrels. The company has a mere twenty employees, almost all of whom are involved in sales and marketing. Competition, mismanagement, changing consumer tastes, and a lack of strategic investment all contributed to its demise. Despite its downturn in fortunes PBC has high hopes for the future – hopes that appear to be based largely upon being able to leverage its local heritage and identity and thereby to make an emotional connection with the people of Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania. Executing this strategy means being visible in the community through sponsorship of everything from community fish fries to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The latter seems to make sense as Iron City and Pittsburgh sports have a long historical connection. This is perhaps best epitomized by the 1988 “You Can’t Keep an Iron Man Down” television commercial which shows blue collar Pittsburgh residents playing basketball, baseball, and football in the city streets while making reference to the fact that the city is indeed a sports town.

So both the steel and traditional brewing industries have left Pittsburgh.  Despite the departure of the latter I believe that the city has a bright brewing future. Like the broader economy, however, this will be a re-configured future; one based on small-scale independently-owned craft breweries. As with many cities across America Pittsburgh is experiencing a craft beer boom. There are a dozen craft breweries in the city. And it’s not just breweries. There’s CraftPittsburgh, a free bimonthly magazine dedicated to the city’s craft beer scene; a Craft Beer School put on by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust where the curious can come and learn about craft beer from experts while participating in tastings;  and an annual Craft Beer Week held in April that comprises over 300 beer related events throughout the city. While in Pittsburgh I visited one of its craft breweries, Church Brew Works, located inside the re-purposed St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. Established in 1996 Church Brew Works can be found on Liberty Avenue in the city’s Lawrenceville neighborhood, less than a quarter mile from the old Iron City Brewery. So there you have it, in plain sight  and in sharp geographic juxtaposition to each other, the past and the future of brewing in Pittsburgh.