09/26/2026
For Penn Brewery’s 40th anniversary, Head Brewer Christopher Rudolph decided to look a little further back, to the b**rs that were being brewed on this Vinial Street hillside during the Eberhardt & Ober era. That took us into the University of Pittsburgh archives, where original Eberhardt & Ober Brewing Company records from the late 1800s are preserved. We couldn’t find an exact recipe book, so Chris did the next best thing and worked backward. The result is our Eberhardt & Ober Heritage Series, built around what we know about E&O, the b**rs of the time, the ingredients that would have been available and the way brewers actually brewed with them. And that meant taking some modern brewing conveniences right back out of the recipes. The Münchner was brewed with 100% Munich malt and the Vienna L***r with 100% Vienna malt, all sourced directly from Germany. Simple grain bills built around the kinds of base malts that would have existed when Eberhardt & Ober was making b**r here.
Then there’s the fun part, the process. Both b**rs were double decoction mashed, an old-world brewing technique where part of the mash is pulled out, boiled and added back in. A modern brewer could simply add melanoidin malt to help create that deep, rich malt character. Chris didn’t. It wouldn’t have been there in the 1800s, so he created that character through the brewing process instead. Same thing with pH. Acidulated malt makes that job easier today, but brewers in the 1800s didn’t have it, so Chris used Sauergut, intentionally soured wort, to adjust the pH instead.
Are these the exact Eberhardt & Ober recipes from 1885? No. Nobody can honestly say that. They’re reconstructions of what we know those b**rs could have been, using ingredients that would have existed and brewing techniques that would have been familiar to the people making b**r here more than a century ago. The idea was pretty simple. If we’re going to bring Eberhardt & Ober b**rs back for a night, let’s really try to do it right. Get as close as we reasonably can. Brew them the way they would have.
So tonight 9/26, we invite you to step inside our historic E&O lagering caves, try both b**rs and taste a little Pittsburgh history....
