USA, PA: Trace Brewing Co preparing to launch in Pittsburgh

As a freshman at George Washington University, Remnant Brewing Founder Dave Kushner had a roommate from Pittsburgh, Forbes reported on August 11.

“We used to take the Greyhound from DC,” he says, reminiscing on his early visits to the Steel City. “My first night in Pittsburgh, we went to Spaghetti Warehouse (now Cinderlands Brewing) and the bowling alley.”

Almost two decades later, the entrepreneur and brewer calls Pittsburgh home. And with a pedigree that includes Harpoon Brewery, Lord Hobo Brewing Co., Castle Island Brewing Co., Remnant Brewing, and more, Kushner is preparing for his most ambitious project yet: Trace Brewing Co., a brand new brewery in Pittsburgh.

A native of Miami, Dave Kushner completed his undergraduate degree at George Washington University before moving to Boston to law school. After graduating in 2011, he started working for a non-profit. While that occupied three days of his week, he filled his days on Mondays and Fridays by taking a job at John Harvard’s Brew House.

“I knew the head brewer at John Harvard’s because we played soccer together on Sundays,” says Kushner. “I told him, ‘I don’t know anything about making beer, but I’m able bodied.’ The moment I got on the brew deck, I knew this was what I wanted to do.”

Soon, Kushner abandoned his legal career to focus on beer, taking a position as a bartender at Harpoon.

“I was there for about three months before they offered me a full-time cellar position,” he says. “I made the jump in late 2013.”

After working for a while at Harpoon, both Kushner and Prickett left to help open a new brewery called Lord Hobo.

With his background from Harpoon, Kushner became Head of Cellar Operations. Prickett, who has a microbiology and computer programming degree from Stanford, became Head of Lab and Packaging. And the Head Brewer was a man by the name of Vince Tursi, who later made a name for himself at Burial and then DSSOLVR — one of the most anticipated new brewery openings in the last two years.

In early 2016, Prickett and Kushner jumped ships again, this time working as brewery consultants for Castle Island. At the end of 2016, Prickett moved to Seattle while Kushner and moved to Pittsburgh — “to be closer to family,” explains Kushner, whose wife is originally from Morgantown.

Even in 2016, Kushner planned to open a brewery in Pittsburgh. However, fate had other plans.

“My good friend Matthew Boyes-Watson and I went out for drinks in 2016,” says Kushner. “I told him we were moving to Pittsburgh and I wanted help finding investors for a new brewery. He said, ‘I know the right people. But it’s too bad you’re moving out of Boston because I just bought a building in Somerville.’”

After checking it out, Kushner was hooked.

“It was exactly the type of space that Prickett and I had been talking about for our own place,” he says. “When the opportunity arose, we didn’t want to pass up.”

In 2018, Remnant Brewing opened in Sommerville’s Bow Market. The market has thirty different vendors, including Remnant, as well as a wine bar, coffee shop, and food vendors. Remnant’s beer program is headed by Charlie Cummings, formerly the head brewer at the now defunct — but much lauded — Mystic Brewing.

“Bow Market is awesome,” says Kushner. “It’s a collection of independent business owners right in the middle of the densest city in New England.”

In late 2018, he stumbled on the spot that would become Trace Brewing.

As the story goes, when Dave Kushner first moved to Pittsburgh, he dropped off a resumé with Dancing Gnome Brewery founder Andrew Witchey.

“I met him five months before Dancing Gnome opened,” Kushner says. “Andrew [Witchey] said, ‘You’re overqualified but let’s stay friends.’”

A short time later, Kushner introduced Witchey to Zack Colton, a former brewer at Boston’s famous Trillium Brewery who took a position with Dancing Gnome. And Witchey later hired Kushner’s wife, a talented landscape architect and urban designer, to work on his new beer garden.

That sense of community and friendship is something that Kushner captured with Remnant and aims to hit with his new project, which will open in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood.

“Look at breweries at the turn of the century,” says Kushner. “They were carnival sites. We don’t need a Disney World of Breweries, but we want to create an environment where you can get to know your community and your neighbors.”

Kushner signed the lease on Trace Brewing’s new space in early 2019 and started construction in December 2019.

Part of the community atmosphere at Trace Brewing will come from their coffee program, which will use local beans from Redhawk Roasters. By day, the brewery will be a place to get an espresso and meet for an interview. And when you’re done with work, you can grab a drink and sit in the beer garden.

Trace Brewing’s beer program will be run by Brandon McCarthy, formerly of Cinderlands Brewing. The facility features a 10 barrel brewing system and five twenty barrel fermentors.

One of the most unique parts of Trace Brewing’s beer program is a paid six month vocational brewing program aimed at women and people of color.

“Come work at Trace Brewing, we’ll pay you, and we’ll teach you,” says Kushner. “After six months, you’ll have the skills you need to become a professional brewer.”

And while Trace will focus on a variety of styles, they’ll be one of the only breweries in the area with a koelschip, a unique vessel that allows a brewery to make spontaneously fermented sour beer. Rather than using lab-grown yeast to ferment the beer, koelschips let brewers take advantage of a region’s native microflora. The result? Wild and complex sour beer unique to a time and place.

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