At first glance, Pinthouse Pizza’s South Lamar location resembles the type of chain restaurant you find just about everywhere in the United States—a boxy shell stuck out in the parking lot of a shopping center. But glance through the glass window at the far end of the bar, and you’ll see their secret weapon— shoehorned into an impossibly small footprint, a 7 bbl brewhouse from Premier churns out about half of the 3,000 barrels of beer produced by this two-location chain.
The brewhouse might be pint-sized, but the brewing team—headed by Director of Brewing Joe Mohrfeld—is a powerhouse. With three medals (gold, silver, and bronze) at the 2018 World Beer Cup, all in hotly contested hoppy categories, plus another three GABF medals over the past few years, they’ve proven that big things can certainly come from small packages. But even with this success and increasing demand for their beer in Austin and beyond, Mohrfeld remains committed to their founding strategy of staying small and responsive to their customers while using the small systems to their advantage—brewing frequently, creating new customer experiences, and using blended batches to maintain consistency in their bigger brands.
Beer Program
One thing you’ll notice when you step over to the bar in a Pinthouse Pizza location is the extensive lineup of guest taps. Each location features forty-five taps of beer, cider, and cold-brew coffee, with seven to ten taps of various Pinthouse beers. When starting out, their small brewhouse was a challenge—they had three 7 bbl fermentors and one 15 bbl and were constantly running out of their own beer. Still, customer response to their beer was very good, and their own beers accounted for about half of all beer sold that first year. As they’ve been able to invest in additional brewhouse equipment, they’ve grown more adept at timing production to meet demand, and the ratio now sits at about 25 percent guest beer and 75 percent Pinthouse beer at both locations.