Prost Profiles: Chris Steininger and Bebo Pilotto, Third Moon Brewing, Milton, Ontario, Canada

Heavy metal-influenced Canadian brewery specializes in incredible hazy IPAs and bourbon barrel-aged stouts. Will our at the Rochester Real Beer Expo.

Steve “Bebo” Pilotto was scheduled to join us during an interview last week. But he had to miss it for a completely excusable reason — the internet was down and his taproom was slated to open in an hour.

But he certainly wouldn’t have it any way. (OK, he’d probably rather not fuck around with the internet.) He’s doing it his way.

Pilotto and long-time friend Chris Steininger opened Third Moon Brewing four years ago. Third Moon, based in Milton, Ontario, Canada, is built on this DIY ethos. (Milton is 25 miles or 40 kilometers west of Toronto.) It’s precisely why they opened a brewery. Specifically with big, bold beers, Third Moon originally offered something you weren’t likely to find at any Ontario brewery — incredibly vibrant hazy IPAs, decadent pastry stouts, often barrel-aged, and ridiculously over-the-top smoothie sours.

I am so, so wildly excited to welcome Third Moon to Rochester next month for the Rochester Real Beer Expo. It’ll be Third Moon’s first time pouring in this region. And both Pilotto and Steininger are planning to be here to pour their beers.

Pilotto develops the recipes and brews the beers, while Steininger wears many, many other hats. It’s an ideal partnership.

Photo: Bebo Pilotto, left, and Chris Steininger, co-founders of Ontario-based Third Moon Brewing.

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.

Third Moon 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. I think I’m most excited about the Canadian breweries coming across the border to party with us. Especially because I know how complicated it is to gain approval to enter the country with beer. These Canadian spots are putting in the work and I think you’re really gonna love what they offer up.

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 Bebo-less, lovingly edited discussion with Steininger about the history of Third Moon and embracing that DIY, metal-influenced aesthetic.

Steininger: Alright, I’m hopeful Bebo is gonna join us soon. It’s not ideal, obviously.

Cleveland: But we might as well jump in.

Steininger: All the recipes are Bebo’s. He works with the brewing team and I get the beer into the fridge and I get it out of the fridge.

Cleveland: So let’s take it back to the beginning. How did you guys meet?

Steininger: We met (in 2012) through the Untappd app, wouldn’t you know it. We were both beer nerds and one of our mutual friends put together a little meet-and-greet for the dozen of us who became virtual friends on Untappd. We met at a little bar in Hamilton. Bebo and I ended up sitting across from each other. It was a little awkward at first. But then we quickly realized, ‘Oh, I am talking to someone I can relate to.’ We went down the rabbit hole pretty quickly, not only about the beer we love, which is pretty similar in styles, the ones we crave on a daily basis. We also recognized there was an opportunity in the Ontario market, constantly saying to each other, ‘Ughhh, I wish we could get this (type of beer).’

We started hanging out for a couple of years, and Bebo had been brewing for at least five years. At that point, I became one of the lucky friends that his homebrew would go out to. We’d be drinking it and saying, ‘This is special. This doesn’t taste like any other homebrew we’ve had. This is on par with professionals.” No joke, it was on par with the IPAs we were chasing, especially across the U.S.

Bebo grew up in Chicago. At the time we met, my girlfriend was living in Chicago. I was driving there every three weeks or so. And I was coming back with cases of the best U.S. beers I could get. You get the finest from both coasts in Chicago. We knew what world-class beer tasted like, which was very important as a reference point. We knew that Bebo was making beer on par with that. Those were two really important checked boxes on moving toward that next stage.

The two of us then spent the next five years, in secrecy, planning this whole thing. Every Tuesday night, we met and each brought some beers to drink. Usually I would host. We end up drinking like 10 bombers of barrel-aged stout on a Tuesday night every week. My co-worker on Wednesday morning would be like, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you drinking on a Tuesday night?’ And we couldn’t tell anyone. And after five years, we got to the point where we felt if we didn't go forward now, we’d miss the boat.

Cleveland: So when did you open and what sort of hurdles did you face during the process?

Steininger: We opened in May 2020. It was supposed to be 2019, but the brewhouse wasn’t built yet and the pandemic hit in March 2020. We ended up begging and pleading to get it finished before we were bankrupt. The good thing is that we had always planned to do packaged beer to-go. Our model was to do one thing right and then add the next thing, not bite off more than we could chew. We weren’t allowed to open the taproom, which is fine because we didn’t have the money at that point. The build was twice the cost that we thought it would be. We just created a little drive-through in COVID times. It was contactless pickup with online ordering only. That was a no-brainer to us. A lot of Ontario breweries had to pivot. And that’s what we were planning to do already. We hit the ground running and got some nice early support.

Cleveland: What drew you originally to hazy IPAs? And why did you decide you wanted that to be the foundational style for your brewery?

Steininger: Bebo and I love similar styles. The two main styles we love are big IPAs, like big in flavor — double IPA is really the sweet spot, and also bourbon barrel-aged imperial stouts. When we do a share, that’s what it ends up being, those two things. We drink big stouts and then have an IPA to shake our palates loose. Bebo was already brewing a lot of those on a homebrew scale. And then third main style we’ve been known for, we’re the first in Ontario, is heavily fruited sours. That was a new style at the time. We’d been enjoying 450 North and Kings. Mortalis wasn’t even around then. It ended up being $20 to $30 Canadian per can, to get it through someone else. And if it blew up, too bad. That became our third main style. And when we opened the brewery, we realized we were making zero dollars. So we didn’t have any money to buy beer anymore. So if we want to drink it, we better brew it.

Hazies are just our bread and butter. We love West Coast-style IPAs. But even saying that, it’s like a three or four to one ratio of hazies to West Coast. It’s just easier to drink multiple hazies. Although I don’t like to drink two hazies back to back, because I know I’m not tasting the second one accurately until halfway through the glass. We saw the writing on the wall. During planning, we also looked at Untappd ratings for styles. That was part of our research. The Ontario market was underserved in the highest rated styles of beer. So we do a lot of coffee stouts and we do a lot of doubles and triples and beyond that, as you know.

Cleveland: The name of the brewery, and also the aesthetic and the identity, is very unique. It’s got that macabre, almost heavy metal feel. Where did the inspiration come from?

Steininger: Third Moon refers to blue moon, the day Bebo’s first son was born on. So that’s what Third Moon is. But it’s more than that to us. It’s a disruptive force, the blue moon. It asserts itself in the third position of a season. For us, it just means we’re not here to blend in. For us, it reminded us to stay true to our values. We’re doing this because this is what we want. These are the beers we want to drink. This is the way we want to do it. For us, that means putting all of the things we’ve experience as customers and loved, we’re putting those things together. No magic. The way we sell the beer and market the beer, it’s putting it all together.

The third moon also reminds us that we’re connected to all the things around us. The planets are connected. We’re connected to our community and everyone around us. So nothing that we do is in a vacuum. We work together with other businesses in our community, local charities, and we support as many things as we can. We know that if we succeed, we succeed together. It also means that whatever we do, it’s important we’re not causing friction with those around us. It helps keep us grounded and keep our priorities straight.

We’re huge music fans. We both have played in bands before. I played in bands that put our several albums. My Own Devices is the name of the last band I was doing stuff with. You can find some of that music on Spotify if you’re interested. We like heavier music, generally speaking. It’s the bulk of what we listen to. And Bebo likes it even heavier than I do. He’s more death metal. The heavy music, it was like, there are enough cafes playing Belle and Sebastian (Scottish indie pop band) and whatever. We don’t need that. We’re going to go hard at it. Our branding through to our beer names, through to the bold flavor, through to the taproom experience, it’s all very in your face and we’re going hard at what we love. We know that’s very niche. It’s No. 1 complaint, the music, those who aren’t expecting it. But we’re like, ‘Why are we doing this? Why did we leave our day jobs?’ We’re going to put everything into this. Why would we play it safe? It needs to feel like us.

I’m so over-the-moon excited for y’all to experience Third Moon. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few, the latest being a really killer black IPA. And I think you guys are gonna enjoy them as much as I do. Come hang out with us at the Rochester Real Beer Expo in a few weeks!