Cinderlands Beer is a creature that’s evolved multiple times since opening in late 2017. From brewpub origins, it grew into a production brewery. From a production brewery, it’s developed into a flavor-led, broad-spectrum beverage company. Change is part of what defines the company, but always with its hometown of Pittsburgh as the animating force.
It’s a distinctly modern mantra for craft breweries: Adapt or die. Paul Schneider, cofounder and head of brewing operations, says Cinderlands prides itself on the ability to course-correct—or to shed a coat without losing its identity. Revenue streams and product categories are guaranteed to shift, but staying rooted in its home-city ecosystem is what sustains it.
“From Day One, we always wanted to be a brewery that matters a lot to Pittsburgh,” Schneider says. “But the change in how we approach things is really just having our head on a swivel and nose on the ground … and not just thinking that what worked in the past will continue to work. Because, holy cow, how much change has there been in how people consume alcohol in the past four years?”
As a result, the company’s priorities begin with local drinkers: the beverages they want, the flavors they’re seeking, the experiences they enjoy, and the price points they can afford. Beverages—beer or otherwise—are designed to fit those needs. And Cinderlands has proven that this customer-first mindset doesn’t have to chase trends or sacrifice quality: The brewery has four Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup medals in its trophy case—all golds.
“It’s kind of like a big-tent, civic institution–esque mindset where we want to be approachable and accessible to everybody,” Schneider says. “And then, once they’re trying it, it’s really fucking good.”
On pace to brew about 5,200 barrels this year, Cinderlands is ready to step into what it sees as white space between taproom-only “third wave” breweries and distribution-focused regionals. Pittsburgh doesn’t have a hometown brewery making five-figure annual barrelage numbers—such as Wiseacre in Memphis or 4 Hands in St. Louis, to name examples in comparable cities. The Cinderlands team aims to fill that void and help define craft beverages for its city.
“We’re thinking about the Cinderlands beer drinker, but we’ve also done a lot of branching out recently to try to think about the Pittsburgh beer drinker, and then the beverage drinker who might not even be a beer drinker,” Schneider says. It’s why the brewery launched Hop Run hop water. It’s why they make Cindi’s Hard Mountain Tea. It’s why they retooled their double IPAs, once among their most popular beers, to be less expensive and more approachable. It’s all in service of being the maker of Pittsburghers’ homegrown, favorite beverages.
Some of these changes are new. But they’re resonating.
“If you want to know the place is going to be open and good, and you can find a style you like, it’s a safe bet to go to Cinderlands,” says Day Bracey, founder of Pittsburgh’s Barrel & Flow festival. “Whenever I’m like, ‘Where do we go as a group?’, I default to Cinderlands.”
Head on a Swivel
Cinderlands has packed many lives into just six years.
It debuted as a brewpub in the city’s Lawrenceville neighborhood while construction was underway at the brewery’s production facility. That larger space, Cinderlands Warehouse, opened 18 months later. In early 2020, the original brewpub rebranded as Cinderlands Foederhouse, with a Belgian-inspired food menu to match its beers. Schneider imagined a Pittsburgh version of Chicago’s Hopleaf bar, but locals didn’t immediately jump on board. An alt-weekly’s headline about the rebrand read, “Cinderlands’ Lawrenceville location is now officially a ‘foederhouse.’ What exactly does that mean?”
Still, the brewery’s leadership loved the concept and especially its Brett-forward, foeder-aged saison. Medals confirmed these beers were world-class. Maybe the concept just needed more resources. (“We and about a dozen customers were very excited about all of this success,” Schneider says of GABF and WBC wins.)
Cinderlands poured time, effort, and money into Foederhouse, sweating details—should the menu read “fries” or “frites”—and dreaming big by organizing the inaugural Pittsburgh Mixed Culture Festival in 2022 alongside Trace Brewing. Ultimately, the team had to face the harsh reality: Despite these efforts, Pittsburgh just wasn’t embracing Foederhouse to the degree the brewery had hoped.
Schneider says he doesn’t regret these investments—particularly the festival, which he says was “culturally significant, if not commercially significant.” Yet the ledger books told him it was increasingly difficult to justify the attention that leadership was paying to this one sector of the business. So, when the pub’s chef put in his notice, it was the right time to retire Foederhouse and turn it into something that would resonate.
Today, that location is home to its third iteration: Long Story Short, a sandwich shop and bar that serves Cinderlands beer as well as cocktails, cider, and wine. A brewery in its basement still turns out mixed-culture beers, which have won a dedicated following at the Warehouse brewpub and Cinderlands’ taproom in suburban Wexford. It was a lesson in right-sizing and in abandoning sacred cows.
Another pivot came around September 2019, when Schneider’s wife, Emily, took over the brewery’s distribution business. Until then, Cinderlands had self-distributed to a dozen, mostly small accounts. Emily secured placements in Giant Eagle, the city’s largest grocery chain at the time. Then COVID hit, and off-premise retail exploded. By the time the dust settled a year or two later, Cinderlands was operating as a multipronged business with revenue streams it hadn’t fully expected. Production schedules that had once been timed to accommodate seasonal fluctuations in the brewpub were now timed to distributors’ quarterly presale windows.
“I think of us as adaptable opportunists in an ecological sense,” Schneider says. “I would equate us to coyotes, where we are always on the hunt and taking whatever opportunities come our way to eat.”
Flavor World
Today, Cinderlands’ opportunities lie in a dense forest of flavors. The brewery’s hard tea—contract-brewed for package but made on-site for draft—is now its No. 4 brand by dollar sales in distribution. Its citrus-spiked light lager, Lil’ Cinder Lime, is right behind it.
Schneider is bullish on the Lil’ Cinder family, but not because it’s—finally! for real this time!—the year of craft lagers. In fact, Cinderlands doesn’t really play up the beer as a lager, but instead as a low-ABV vehicle for fruit. Lil’ Cinder Mango and Watermelon were slated for 15-barrel batches this year, but distributor interest spurred brewers to up that to 30 barrels each. Both larger batches sold entirely on pre-allocation to wholesalers.
Yinzerade, a line of fruited sour beers, is another promising brand for the brewery, though Schneider says drinkers understand it more as a hard lemonade than a sour beer. “It’s kind of inconsequential that it’s beer,” he says. “It could be whatever base … a wine base or spirits base.”
Development of these products—especially Cindi’s Hard Mountain Tea—required Schneider to think like a beverage maker rather than strictly a brewer. He bought a lenticular filter to polish a high-gravity, neutral malt base. He sourced ingredient samples from cannabis companies, flavor houses, and other suppliers outside the beer world, conducting extensive benchtop trials and keeping a detailed spreadsheet of notes and costs. He’s come to understand which products to use, from which suppliers, in what combinations, and at what rates to achieve desired flavor outcomes.
“When it’s time to add a new Yinzerade flavor or dial up a part of a hoppy beer that we really want to pop, we’re not starting from scratch or shooting from the hip,” Schneider says. “We know what products work. We know what their limitations are. We know what they cost. We know how to get them. It’s plug-and-play at this point.”
That knowledge also has improved some of Cinderlands’ beeriest beers: their double IPAs. In the second half of 2023, Cinderlands moved to address flagging on- and off-premise sales for its DIPAs, a trend that appeared to be true for other area breweries as well. Access to a growing library of advanced hop products and the dominance of imperial IPA in national scan data gave Schneider hope, but he understood that making the margins work would be a tall order.
Before launching Super Squish—a new hazy double IPA in its Squish family of hazy, hoppy beers—Cinderlands consulted with its distributors and retailers. They discussed pricing expectations, landing on a per-barrel budget around which Schneider built a recipe. At $15.99 per four-pack, Super Squish is priced in line with Full Squish hazy IPA, despite its elevated ABV and hop profile. That price point has made Cinderlands attractive to retailers as well as drinkers.
“Their pricing is really competitive,” says Tyler Azar, general manager for Creekside Beer in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. “It’s still above national craft, obviously—it has to be—but they’re probably closer to that than a lot of other breweries are. Retailers dig that they can get good beer with a lot of name recognition at that price.”
The recipe for Super Squish starts with an efficient malt bill to land final gravity at 9 percent ABV, then it layers in T-90 and Cryo pellets plus a hot-side hop dip, finishing with two varietal-specific hop extracts on the cold side.
“We had done so much work with these products in our IPAs and hop water already that we were drawing on extensive bench and production experience by this time,” Schneider says. “Since getting maximum intensity out of them was high on our priority list in order to meet that budget, I knew which products were punchy and on-target with the hop profile already, understood how to layer them, and shot for that gap in the market.”
Super Squish is engineered to be a lean, clean hop machine: A 30-barrel batch of it gets eight pounds of Cryo and two kilos of hop extract on the hot side, then 44 pounds of American and Southern Hemisphere T-90 pellets and four pounds of Columbus Cryo (“for some edge”) as dry hops. Post-centrifuge, they dose the batch with 550 milliliters of extract, all harmonizing with or filling gaps in the earlier T-90 varieties.
“Probably my biggest tool as a beverage producer right now is the work that I’ve done on being able to arrive at the target flavors efficiently in terms of time and cost and ingredient usage,” Schneider says.
Super Squish debuted in March, earning Cinderlands its first 19.2-oz can placements in Giant Eagle; it’s also part of the Squish variety pack, the brewery’s third best-selling SKU. It also had a profound influence on Schneider’s approach to brewing: Super Squish is proof that adaptation, strategy, and a consumer-first mindset can create wins—even in a tough time for craft beer.
“It’s taking into account industry trends, consumer trends, packaging and format trends, and thinking about how we use this platform that we have,” he says. “And when I say platform, I think of our production capacity, our personnel, our brand equity, our physical locations, our audience. How do we use this platform in the highest way at any given time?”
Cinderlands continues to fine-tune its nose for opportunity. It has put the team on course to be the Pittsburgh stalwart they hope to be—no matter what transmogrifications the future requires.