A longtime New Stanton homebrewer is jumping into the beer business and opening the only brewery in the borough between Greensburg and West Newton.
“This has always been a dream of mine. I had a five-gallon batch system in my kitchen and then I installed a 20-gallon system in the garage,” said Todd Bartlow, who has been serving homemade beer to family and friends and who, along with his wife, Joy, are opening Cool Daddy Brewing Co. on Saturday in a storefront on Bridge Street in New Stanton.
Joy Bartlow, who is listed as the brewery manager in LCB records, explained that her husband, who teaches a powerline course at Central Westmoreland Career and Technology Center in New Stanton, had been talking for years about wanting to open a brewery to sell the beer he’s been brewing for 27 years.
“We either do it or we don’t talk about it,” Joy Bartlow, a teaching assistant at Central Westmoreland CTC, said her husband told her.
They began planning in earnest about 18 months ago, with Bartlow traveling to West Virginia, Michigan and as far away as North Carolina to find discount fermenters, boiling kettles and mash tuns to brew their product in a seven-barrel system.
They rented space in a building owned by their friend Rex Zerbe and expanded by 1,200 square feet, installing a brewing system, creating room for 80 patrons, and adding an LCB-approved seating area outside the building.
They invested about $100,000 into the venture, according to Bartlow, including buying all of the brewing equipment, hops, barley and yeast, renovating the storefront into an attractive bar and expanding the building. Joy Bartlow said they were able to fund the venture by selling a rental property they owned.
The Bartlows said market research showed them that people would travel far to visit a locally owned brewery, so they worked with Saint Vincent College’s Small Business Development Center to develop a business plan for the brewery.
Todd Bartlow said the biggest challenge in making his dream a reality wasn’t sourcing the equipment or materials, but getting all the necessary state and local permits. Bartlow, a New Stanton Borough Councilman, said he had to submit land development plans to the borough for approval, a process similar to what SunCap Property Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, went through when it built a 1 million-square-foot Amazon warehouse, albeit on a much smaller scale.
The Bartlow family will own one of 21 breweries operating in Westmoreland County, according to the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Commission. Most breweries have taprooms and breweries sell their product on-site.
“The other breweries have been great,” Todd Bartlow said of the breweries he’s talked to about the business.
“It’s not a competition. Everybody’s different,” Todd Bartlow said.
Cool Daddy Brewing doesn’t have a kitchen, but that’s not a requirement for breweries that sell beer on premises. The LCB only requires breweries to offer snacks like pretzels and potato chips to meet food sales requirements. By contrast, Westmoreland County has only three licensed brewpubs, so those businesses have the opportunity to sell their product at off-site catering venues, said LCB spokesman Sean Kelly.
With a seven- to 10-barrel brewing system, Cool Daddy Brewing easily fits the criteria set by the Boulder, Colo., Brewers Association to classify itself as a small, independent craft brewery with an annual production capacity cap of 6 million barrels. Bartlow said the turnaround time for beer production would be two weeks, and the brewing system could produce about 180 barrels per year.
The Bartlows’ opening comes at a time when the number of breweries in Pennsylvania is set to decline slightly, from 531 in 2022 to 530 in 2023, according to statistics compiled by the Brewers Association. Pennsylvania still ranks second only to California as the state with the most craft breweries, but it will be the first time in 12 years that the number of breweries in Pennsylvania will decline, according to the Brewers Association, which tracks the Brewers Association data.
The good news for Bart Laws and other craft brewers is that Pennsylvania beer drinkers consumed about 5,816 more barrels of beer last year than they did last year, according to the Brewers Association, which will boost production to 3.1 million barrels in 2023. The flip side of this statistic, which may give brewery owners reason to pause brewing, is that beer production in the Keystone State is down about 590,000 barrels from 2018 to 2023.
Bartlow’s will open with six beers on tap for customers to enjoy, and Todd Bartlow said the company has the system in place to serve 16 beers on tap and can expand the selection to include selling hard ciders from other producers.
“You can tell there’s a love for beer, and it shines through. There’s something for everyone,” Todd Bartlow said.
Joe Napsha is a Triblive reporter covering the Irwin, North Huntingdon and Norwin school districts. He also writes about business issues. He grew up on Neville Island and has worked for Triblive since the early 1980s. He can be reached at jnapsha@triblive.com.
