Jackworth Ginger Beer

Jackworth is a ginger beer brewery at 6615 Hamilton Avenue in Larimer, and the founder's name really is Jackworth Smith. He grew up in his father's restaurant and bar in the East End, started washing dishes at six and was tending bar at seventeen, and in 2013 used century-old recipes and his own fermentation knowledge to make the first batches at home on a half-barrel system. The brewery opened to the public on 9 May 2024. Pittsburgh Magazine catalogued the room better than any summary could: the bar is made from an old fence, marble salvaged from a bank and gold-leaf windows from a gutted mansion, and the fittings run to a desanctified holy water font, a Joe Camel dartboard and the original Dunning's Grille sign on a distressed wall. The drink tokens are poker chips reading "Hey, hun! Good for one." The magazine's description of the aesthetic — somewhere between industrially elegant and gothically yinzer — is exactly right. It opens at 5pm most nights, 4pm on Friday and noon at weekends.

The reason it belongs on an alcohol-free list is structural rather than incidental. Ginger beer is fermented, and fermentation is where the alcohol comes from, so Jackworth brews the same product two ways: an Original and a Sorrel at 5% ABV, and a canned zero-proof line printed at 0.0%. That line runs Classic (organic Peruvian ginger, lime, water, cane sugar), Spicy (the same with habanero), Honey Lavender and Dry. Because the base is genuinely brewed rather than mixed from syrup, the alcohol-free version has the bite and body that make ginger beer worth drinking, which is not true of most zero-proof substitutes. The bar also builds zero-proof cocktails on it — a Texas Remedy, a Blood in the River and a Peaches for CJ have all been on the list — though the bar menu is published in a format that cannot be read online, so treat the names as indicative and ask when you arrive. One curiosity worth flagging so nobody is caught out: Jackworth makes an Orange Kush in collaboration with Wiz Khalifa's Khalifa Kush brand, which sounds infused and is not. Its own label says no THC, no CBD — the cannabis strain supplies terpenes for flavour only.