Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Associated Press
PITTSBURGH
Though distilled spirits run in the region’s historical veins as much as coke or iron, there hasn’t been a whiskey still in southwestern Pennsylvania in decades — not a legal one, anyway — and there hasn’t been a distillery of any kind within Pittsburgh’s city limits in nearly a century. But that changes this summer, when an “artisan” whiskey distillery opens in the Strip District.
Wigle Whiskey will be distilled on the ground floor of the Pittsburgh Wool Co. building, beneath the Schoolhouse Yoga classroom. Its owners, Eric Meyer and his father, Mark, and other family members named the whiskey after Philip Wigle, one of two men convicted of treason and sentenced to hang for his role in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.
From the Rebellion and a century onward, southwestern Pennsylvania was an important whiskey-producing region, and its Monongahela rye was more widely consumed, at least into the 1800s, than Kentucky bourbon. At one point, by one author’s account, more than a quarter of the young nation’s distilleries were within 50 miles of Pittsburgh.
The Meyer family will be bringing whiskey back to the region for the first time since the 1970s, when Schenley Distillery in Armstrong County (known for its Sam Thompson brand, among others) stopped producing. In Pittsburgh, the last distillery probably was Joseph S. Finch, which was out of Pittsburgh for good by 1920, according to Sam Komlenic, editor of Malt Advocate.
“The major distilleries moved out of the cities after Prohibition,” he said. Joseph S. Finch, for example, moved its operations to the Schenley plant after Prohibition ended.
The Meyer family and its contractors — including builder M M Marra and architect Edge Studio — have spent the past five months gutting the empty garage and warehouse space, splashing it in blues, yellows and greens, installing cabinets and plumbing, hanging whiskey bottles-turned-light fixtures.