Even if you had the address, you could easily drive by and not be sure you passed Arboretum Trail Brewing Co.
Which is fine, because the public is not allowed to go there. This garage brewery — literally in the former garage of a brick ranch house in a residential part of Pleasant Hills — is licensed as a production brewery only, making beer to be sold elsewhere. That’s why there are no hours, no sign — nothing.
But recently, Ben Steffen and his partner Dan Shultz finished installing their little electric 3.5-barrel brewhouse and had their first official brew day. And it was good.
You can start watching for cans of Arboretum Trail’s first brews here and there, with draft beer and more to come. Maybe much more. They had to start somewhere, so they started in Mr. Steffen’s garage.
“This is a cozy 306 square feet,” Steffen says, before leading a tour, which he can pretty much do with his eyes as he looks around the tiny space. But it has everything a brewery needs, if on a smaller scale, including the plastic fermenters they’re using until they’re specially made — “a little shorter and a little fatter” to fit the space or lack thereof. They’ll start with three fermenters and a bright tank and hope to need to add a fermenter or two this summer.
“That’s maxed out,” he says. “There’s no more room at the inn.”
But at that point they can entertain opening a bigger space for brewing as well as a taproom where people can come and have a beer.
They have to get off the ground first.
The name comes from the Pleasant Hills Arboretum — also known for its founder as the A.W. Robertson Arboretum — just across Bruceton Road from the Steffen house. Through its trees he and his kids can watch the sunrise in the mornings.
The longtime home brewer, who helped out for a bit at a local production brewery, knows Shultz, of North Strabane, from their day jobs, and now he’s teaching him to brew so they can go after their shared dream.
They’re starting with easy to make, easy-drinking beers such as a blonde ale named Tree Top Sunrise and a cream ale called Me in the Mirror, which they hope to be licensed to start selling in April. They plan to have a repertoire of hoppy stuff, and Steffen has an award-winning brown ale up his sleeve and a Robertson’s Red. They just have to scale up that recipe to work on this bigger, if still small, system.
They even already have a barrel-aging “program,” if you count the small barrel of breakfast stout aging in the back left corner of the garage.
They knew that would take some time but have been stressed by the delays to construction and more exacerbated by trying to open amidst a global pandemic. But, so it goes.
“You can’t worry about things outside your control,” says Steffen. “We’re here and we’re going to be making beer. We’re going to get it out there however we can,” to a public they know appreciate local beer made by hard-working local people like themselves. Even in a crowded field, “It’s nuances that make different beers.”
So they believe Western Pennsylvanians will help them find their niche.
Even if they’re not to supposed to find the actual brewery.
Arboretum Trail is located at 200 W. Bruceton Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15236 — again, it’s not open to the public — and the phone is 412-357-2737. For more information, visit https://arboretumtrailbrewing.com. For more on the Pleasant Hills Arboretum, visit http://www.pleasanthillsarboretum.org. Both also can be found on Facebook.
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Opening Friday is the new North Side taproom for Charleroi’s Four Points Brewing Co., which is located at 917 Western Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15233 (the former Shamrock Inn). It starts out selling cans to go, but as head brewer Adam Boura noted recently on social media, “This is just the beginning of the story down there too.”
Bob Batz Jr.: bbatz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1930 and on Twitter @bobbatzjr.
First Published: March 25, 2021, 1:01 p.m.
Updated: March 25, 2021, 1:14 p.m.
