Shot and a Beer

Everyone is happy in Pittsburgh these days, or so it seems, with the clear exception of the workers at Iron City Brewing. A few days ago, the troubled brewer announced that production will move from Lawrenceville to Latrobe, putting an end to well more than 100 years of Iron City brewing in the city of Pittsburgh and, the owners hope, to the last decade's worth of financial troubles.

There's no going back or re-writing recent history [the link is to a Wikipedia summary of Iron City], but it didn't have to be that way. Iron City Brewing is a dying relic of Pittsburgh's better industrial and local-brewing past. The beers themselves have a loyal following, I assume, but I've never heard anyone go out of their way to say that any Iron City brand is distinctive or great or even good. The hubbub over the move to Latrobe isn't a hubbub over loss of a distinctive Pittsburgh taste. (For example, the Church Brew Works, just up the street from Iron City in Lawrenceville, makes beer I can believe in.) It's a hubbub over one of the few remaining public connections to the region's 19th century industrial greatness (Pittsburgh was the "Iron City" in the 19th century and became the "Steel City" in the 20th), and over a dwindling number of brewery jobs.

As a non-native, I've always contrasted Iron City with the very different trajectory of my favorite beer from the West Coast, Anchor Steam Beer. Forty-five years ago, Anchor -- a dying relic of San Francisco's better industrial and local-brewing past -- was on the edge of bankruptcy and went up for sale. The brewery was bought for pennies, metaphorically speaking, by a young local entrepreneur named Fritz Maytag (part of the appliance family), who kept the brewery in San Francisco and gradually renewed the production facilities, the brand, and the quality of the product. To many people, Anchor Steam Beer is an microbrew emblem of the high-end Yuppie culture that took over much of San Francisco during the last 20 years, but the real story is one of entrepreneurship, perserverance, and craft manufacturing. Anchor is a tale of urban brewery death and rebirth. Fritz Maytag decided to make good beer, even great beer. To his fans, he's done exactly that.

Renewing the past with entrepreneurship and hard work is the sort of thing that Pittsburgh likes to think it is really, really good at. Make and market a top-quality product, respect the changing demands of the marketplace, and the money will come. But not in this case. The Iron City case shows that sometimes, the mythology is just mythology. In the mid-1980s, Pittsburgh Brewing (the earlier name of Iron City Brewing) had a successful light beer. Around the time that the microbrewing market was starting to take off, Pittsburgh Brewing went in the other direction, and the company was sold to an international syndicate. I wasn't in Pittsburgh then, but in retrospect that bid to hold on to something of a mass market seems arguably to have been the first nail in the brewery's coffin. Around that same time, Fritz Maytag's perserverance began to pay off in earnest. I remember 1985 and 1986 as the time when Anchor Steam beer caught its first modern marketing wave.

Will Iron City survive in Latrobe? Not by pretending that it's still a Pittsburgh product. Only if it makes a beer that enough people want to buy, and only if it can clear up its balance sheet. Honor the ghosts of Pittsburgh past, but don't listen to them. Listen to the marketplace.