Prost Profiles: Andrew Witchey/Dancing Gnome Beer, Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh-area brewery excels at so many styles. Many will be available next month at the Rochester Real Beer Expo.

I really like Dancing Gnome brewery. The Pittsburgh-area brewery makes a lot of different beers and does it exceedingly well.

I also feel like Dancing Gnome directly mirrors my evolution as a beer nerd. I went from being hazy-obsessed, giddily chasing down weekly New England-style IPA releases. And now, I’m at a spot where I appreciate nuance, drinkability, and tradition more than I ever did. (Do I still love hazy IPAs? Absolutely. But it’s not the only style you’re gonna find in my fridge.)

Dancing Gnome founder Andrew Witchey did that, too. When Dancing Gnome opened in the borough of Sharpsburg in 2016, the tap list represented what Witchey, now the brewery’s director of operations, liked to drink — hazy IPAs. And like many beer nerds, Witchey’s palate grew and he wanted to produce more variety.

Dancing Gnome is pretty much my ideal of a modern craft brewery. It still excels with IPAs, though it has added a wide range of West Coast-leaning offerings. Its flagship pale ale Lustra is one of those perfect every-day drinking beers. (If it was consistently available around Rochester, I’d always have it in my fridge.) And now, Dancing Gnome features a rotating lineup of German-inspired classics. (Plus, I love how the beers are packaged in those iconic 12-ounce stubby bottles.)

To get you even more amped for the 2024 Rochester Real Beer Expo, which will take place on Saturday, June 8, at Innovative Field in downtown Rochester, I am again sharing some interviews to introduce attendees to festival newcomers.

Dancing Gnome is among that group. In total, we’re gonna have more than 75 breweries, some really lovely non-alcoholic options, three cideries, and even a local coffee roaster with some cold brew. Dancing Gnome will be one of three Pittsburgh breweries present. (Both Old Thunder and Cinderlands joined us last year.)

If you want to kick it VIP style, I suggest you move quickly. Those tickets are flying right now and will surely sell out before the festival. I am also particularly proud of the fact that the ticket prices haven’t increased at all this year. More details here: https://www.ticketreturn.com/prod2new/BuyNew.asp?EventID=343454.

Once again I am working with the fine folks from BASWA (Business Association of the South Wedge Area). Of note, this event is the group’s biggest fundraiser of the year. So it’s a wonderful way to support a really great group.

What follows is a lovingly edited transcript of my recent chat with Andrew. Hope you enjoy. And if you haven’t, I am truly excited for you to experience Dancing Gnome beers at the upcoming Expo.

Cleveland: You got me in the middle of mowing the lawn. So this is a nice break, I’m not gonna complain. Let’s start at the beginning: How did you get involved in beer? And what are the seeds for Dancing Gnome?

Witchey: Back in the day, in the early 2010s, I guess, I just fell in love with beer. I grew up in a very food-oriented, culinary-focused family. Not overly beverage or alcohol-focused, but when I started drinking, I gravitated toward craft beer really quickly. I really liked the culinary aspect of it. It became a hobby of enjoying the product and trying to find as many new beers as I could — mostly, American craft, but slowly getting into more historical and traditional beers from Germany, the U.K., Belgium, and things like that. In my job at the time, I traveled a lot. So in my travels, I would spend my free time hanging out at breweries and talking to brewers, brewery owners, and people at beer bars. I just loved the scene. So I wanted to be in it. I made the choice to start switching my career path. I went to the American Brewers Guild in Vermont. I finished that program, which is called the Intensive Brewing Science and Engineering program, and that’s when I started homebrewing.

I didn’t homebrew much outside of being practical for an educational standpoint. I was doing small batch commercial brewing, instead of homebrewing, if that makes sense. There’s not really a distinction, but there’s kind of a distinction. I finished that and was looking for roles in the industry. I was young and Pittsburgh is Pittsburgh. There weren’t a ton of breweries here. The ones that were here were small and old school. I saw an available market here. I was young and had nothing to lose at that point. Instead of working for someone else, I figured I might as well open my own spot and work for myself.

I wrote my business plan in 2014. It took about a full year to get financing and find the space. It took about eight to 10 months to build out and open up. We opened in October of 2016. And then ran that spot and started working on a new spot (about 500 feet from the original location) in 2019. With COVID delays, that finally opened in October 2021. We have both spots now. Only one is open to the public.

Cleveland: How did you settle on Sharpsburg for your brewery?

Witchey: It was a little bit of ‘right place, right time.’ When I started looking, I very much wanted to be center city. There were no breweries within the city center. Everyone was kind of on the outskirts. Even when Roundabout and Hop Farm opened up in Lower Lawrenceville, even that was pushing the outskirts of the city. I was really look at center city and it just wasn’t working. I saw so many places and they either weren’t well suited or they would’ve taken so much effort to convert. You’d have cheap rent, but you’d have to put in so much money to make it viable. Or you had this viable spot and the rent was sky high. So I was working with a real estate agent and he was like, ‘Why don’t you expand? You might be surprised.’ We saw the spot in Sharpsburg and I genuinely loved it. But at the time, I was looking to purchase a building and they only wanted to lease.

I put it on the back burner and six months go by and I’m still looking for a space. Some of my financials had changed. Basically, things just kept getting more expensive. I nixed the idea of buying a building, so I could put it all into renovating a space and purchasing equipment. When I switched gears, the space was still available. I went back to them and we ended up working on a deal. At the time, they actually had another brewery that was already signed onto it. The space wasn’t a brewery before. It was a plumbing showroom and warehouse. It was laid out perfectly. The front half was the taproom, the back half was the brewery. That brewery ended up falling through and they ended up calling me up. Within a week or two, there I was signing on the dotted line.

I grew up in that AK Valley (Allegheny-Kiski Valley, just outside Pittsburgh) and it’s always been an easy place to pass by and not really know it’s here. The great thing about it is that outside of all the damn construction, which happens everywhere, you can get to it from so many different places. It it its own borough, which is actually really beneficial from a bureaucratic standpoint. I don’t deal with the city of Pittsburgh at all. The city of Pittsburgh surrounds Sharpsburg. I go to Sharpsburg and not the city of Pittsburgh. Same with our water. We use Hampton Shaler water and our water source is much more consistent. We don’t really have to change our water profile to brew. And the final aspect, so few people knew about it, but even those who did, it’s not like they had a negative opinion about it. I knew that I would be able to bring people to it.

Cleveland: Where did the brewery name come from?

Witchey: I wish I had a better story for this one. It’s multi-faceted. I had a bunch of names written down and every so often, I’d go through and scratch off ones that didn’t work. And Dancing Gnome always made the next list. Part of the ethos is about just being passionate and caring about everything you do. I hate using the phrase ‘work hard, play hard,’ because it’s very much overused. But that’s the easiest, most concise way to put it. Within all of that, just have passion. No one likes working. We all have to do it. It sucks. Capitalism is here and money runs everything. So you might as well give a shit about it and do your best and make your day better because you care. The same thing when you’re playing, like care about it, do your best, have fun. That was the whole ethos of the brand.

To me, that’s kind of what the gnome represents. These little asshole characters that mess around in your garden. But ultimately, they’re tending to your garden and making sure it is lush. But then they are gonna go pull pranks and be that way.

The personal part, it’s just weird and I’m pretty weird. I thought that for better or worse, people were gonna remember it. We don’t use any gnomes in our branding, which is pretty weird. At this point, eight years on, no one really questions that anymore. In the beginning, we got a lot of questions about it.

Cleveland: When we first visited the original spot, the brewery was definitely hazy-focused. And you’ve really evolved and added to your portfolio. You guys just crush traditional stuff now. How has that evolution happened?

Witchey: We brew what we want to brew and we brew what we’re passionate about. We put our all into it. I have no issue with somebody doing 10,000 styles. But for us, that’s not what we’re gonna do. Specifically, we’re gonna focus on German styles and also some continental lagers. Some Czech stuff, some Austrian stuff, but mostly German. And then we do American hops and that’s about it. That’s what I like. I love English beers, too. But to be honest, they’re like my white whale. I struggle to get them to be of the quality I feel is important to push it to the world. The other thing is, I really love ESB. We’ve been working on that forever. But this batch, I thought was excellent and that’s why we put it out in bottles. It doesn’t sell the same as other stuff. We’ll still do it and try to push it out there. But if we tried to be an English-only brewery, we quickly wouldn’t be in business. That’s really the genesis.

I opened as a hazy brewery because that’s what I was drinking. I got into craft beer so aggressively, so early that I saw the Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, Bissell Brothers, Trillium, I saw them all open and went those places, tried their beers, heard about them on forums. I loved that stuff. Brew Gentlemen (in neighboring Braddock) was just starting to do haze. There was some influence at that time (Andrew here points to Roundabout Brewing), but no one was really pushing haze. It was what I wanted to do. I think it still says it on the website, ‘unapologetically hoppy.’ We were going to be a brewery for people who were already into beer. I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m not trying to get you to like craft. You already like craft and that’s why you’re gonna come to us.

And then my palate changed and I am perpetually studying beer. I’ve dedicated my life to it. We decided to dedicate ourselves to lager. We got some tanks and said, ‘Let’s do this.’ We care a lot about it. We try to do it in the most traditional, accurate manner possible.