On Julius Street in Larimer, sandwiched between two busy thoroughfares and across the street from a buzzing cell tower, sits a nondescript warehouse that holds two of Pittsburgh’s best kept secrets.
Commonplace Coffee Roasters and East End Brewing sit at opposite ends of what essentially amounts to a large, warm, atmospheric room. Commonplace serves some of the city’s best coffee. East End serves some of the city’s best beer.
Where else can you get drunk and jittery at the same time? Where else can you take yoga classes, the price of which includes a free drink? Play “Attack from Mars” pinball? It’s a beautiful marriage, and it’s part of what brewer Nordy Siljander says makes East End so special.
If there’s one thing that defines the brewery, it’s the variety of styles they produce. Their flagship Big Hop IPA tastes of pine with a solid malt backbone; other popular beers include Black Strap Stout, Fat Gary Nut Brown Ale, and Monkey Boy, a hefeweizen that—thanks to the ester profile—tastes like bananas.
Their seasonal beers add some more variety to wheelhouse and includes East End Witte (a Belgian wheat beer), Nunkin (a pumpkin-less pumpkin beer), and, for Valentine’s Day, the aptly named Chocolate Covered Cherry Stout, which uses 44 pounds of Belgian dark chocolate and Michigan sour cherries.
And then there are the one-offs and delicious experiments like Eye Opener Coffee Porter, which incorporates coffee beans from East End’s across-the-room neighbor, Commonplace Coffee, and The Ugly American, a Belgian Trippel enhanced (or corrupted, if you’re a purist) with “a completely inappropriate amount of US hops.” Most all of the beers are “sessionable,” a current brewing industry trend that keeps beers at a low ABV, the goal being that you can drink a few before you need to tap out.
Drinking at East End feels like supporting the Penguins or the Steelers. The brewery donates their spent grain to local farms. The majority of their beer labels were designed by Pittsburgh artist Wayno; art for their Illustration Ale used the talents of six different local artists, and a portion of the proceeds helped support the ToonSeum in the Strip District. For their wall murals, East End hired Commonwealth Press, a group of self-described “fiercely independent, ink soaked, music addicted, code spewing, event hosting, design loving, Pittsburgh embracing, hyper creative” screen printers.
Siljander, who has been brewing at East End for several years, often jumps behind the bar to help man the tap lines, and there’s a regular crew at East End that’s as embedded in the beer as they are on their bar stools. One of Siljander ’s favorite stories about East End is about the way that East End favorite “Fat Gary,” a 3.8 percent ABV nut brown ale got its name. As Siljander tells it, brewery owner Scott Smith has a friend named Fat Gary; when Fat Gary tried the Big Hop IPA and Black Strap Stout, two of East End’s biggest sellers, he complained that they tasted too much like hops. So Smith made a hop-less nut brown ale, which he named after his friend. And of course Fat Gary’s palette has since changed, and now he doesn’t like his own beer.
As the brewery celebrates their third anniversary in the Larimer location, they’re also releasing three new offerings—a peach sour, a bourbon barrel aged oatmeal stout, and a bourbon barrel aged nut brown ale—as well as the debut of the innovative “Crowler” machine.
Invented by the creative minds at Colorado’s Oskar Blues brewery, the crowler sits somewhere in between the aluminum can and the growler. After its release, customers will be able to order any of East End’s offerings in 32-ounce to-go cans, which will be sealed right at the counter.
East End Brewing (147 Julius Street)
Kenny Gould is a novelist and writer living in Pittsburgh, PA, where he’s currently getting his MFA. His favorite beer is Lawson’s Finest Liquid’s ‘Sip of Sunshine.’ Follow him on Twitter at @kb_gould
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