Cinderlands Beer Company

Cinderlands was founded in 2017 by two married couples, Jamie and Joanna Warden and Paul and Emily Schneider, and the Warehouse on Smallman Street is the big one — its largest location and its main production centre. The building dates from 1880 and runs to 17,500 square feet across two floors, with two forty-foot bars carrying sixteen draft lines, a built-in bocce court, dome hockey, shuffleboard and a covered, heated patio upstairs. Jamie Warden's line as it was about to open in 2019 was that the project had been over three years in the making, with thousands of hours of work, blood, sweat and tears in it. The food is smokehouse pub cooking with prices that have not run away: smoked wings and fried pickles at $12, pulled pork at $13, loaded nachos at $11, a jumbo pretzel at $15, and a genuine kids' menu with grilled cheese at $5. It opens at 11.30am most days and 10.30am on Sunday.

What brings a non-drinker here is Hop Run, and it is worth understanding what it actually is. Hop water is not non-alcoholic beer — there is no malt and no fermentation, so there is nothing to de-alcoholise. It is water, carbonation and hops, which means it delivers the aroma and the dry bitter finish that make an IPA satisfying without any of the sugar, calories or alcohol. Cinderlands brews and cans its own in Pittsburgh, showcasing Citra and Mosaic, and prints it unambiguously at 0.0% — a genuine zero rather than the 0.5% that most "non-alcoholic" beer carries, which matters to anyone who avoids even trace alcohol. A can is $4. Better still, the bar treats it as an ingredient rather than a consolation: there is a printed section headed Hop Run Mocktails holding a Cranberry Lime Refresher and a Hop Run Mule, both $6, both built on it. That is the difference between a brewery that stocks something for the designated driver and one that has thought about them.