Prost Profiles: Cinderlands Beer senior brewer Kiel Batanian

Pittsburgh brewery, across its multiple locations, has built a reputation on an incredible variety of styles and quality. Will pour at June's Rochester Real Beer Expo.

A West Coast-style Pilsner, a hard ice tea, and a collaborative Franconian lager with noted brewery Human Robot — those are the three beers Pittsburgh-based Cinderlands Beer is transporting up to Rochester for its first time pouring in western New York.

Those all sound like ideal summer crushers to me. And they outline the exact reason I’m over-the-moon excited to welcome Cinderlands to Rochester for upcoming Rochester Real Beer Expo. The 5-year-old Pennsylvania brewery has already garnered a gold medal (in the Brett beer category) at the Great American Beer Festival in 2021 and then a gold at the most recent World Beer Cup competition in the same category (but for a different beer).

Senior brewer Kiel Batanian oversees production at Cinderlands’ two production facilities — its larger warehouse production space and the smaller foederhouse.

Photo (left to right): Ryan Maerder, Kiel Batanian, and Evan Thorsen, the Cinderlands brewing team.

I’m wildly excited to host Cinderlands as it makes its western New York debut at the Rochester Real Beer Expo on Saturday, June 10, at Innovative Field, the home of the Rochester Red Wings baseball club. VIP tickets are sold out and general admission is moving quickly. I recommend securing a ticket ASAP at rochesterrealbeer.com.

I was able to connect with Kiel recently to learn more about Cinderlands and what makes it special. Here are the highlights from our conversation:

Q: Can you give me a little history of the brewery and also outline your experience in brewing?

A: We’ve been open five years now. We started at the smaller location in (the) Lawrenceville (neighborhood) in Pittsburgh. In that neighborhood, we opened with a little 3.5-barrel brewhouse in the basement of a restaurant. So it was a small production site to get things going. The big plan from the beginning was to acquire this big space we’re in now on Smallman Street (in Pittsburgh’s Strip District) for the warehouse location. But they couldn’t pass up the spot in Lawrenceville. So they put a little brewing system in there to get things going for the first year before things opened up at the big facility.

I came on at the end of the smaller location being the only space. I helped open up the bigger facility. I have a little more brewing experience with some bigger operations. I am originally from Pittsburgh. I moved to California in 2009 and got a degree in international relations. I was applying for some jobs and nothing really worked out, but I had this bartending job I was doing during my senior year and it was one of the old good beer bars in the Central Valley in Stockton, Calif. It was actually a Trappist (Belgian) bar, so we had Chimay White on draft. We had a couple of the abbey ales on draft. We were doing a mix between craft and Belgian stuff on draft. I just met a lot of people that way.

I worked my way up to Sacramento and started working for a company called Ruhstaller. They have their own hop field and they have a focus on the rustic-ness of that. I was sort of like their R&D brewer. I had a little homebrewing experience and just jumped in head first. I was working on this little 50-gallon system that they had going. I did that for about a year and then I moved onto a company in the Bay Area called E.J. Phair. They were doing their own beers on a 30-barrel system, but they were also doing a lot of contract brewing. We brewed for companies like High Water Brewing, some of these guys that were looking for more volume. So we split our time between brewing our own beers, brewing for places looking for more volume, and making beers for people that were starting their brands. I learned a lot about production brewing from that job.

Then I hit a wall in my life and wanted to move back home here. I was ready to help push this scene along. I feel like there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t happening here that I could help bring to this scene. Being close to my family, being closer to my sports teams, I know that sounds silly. It’s harder to support your teams when you’re 3,000 miles away. I came back and started working at Rivertowne Brewing for almost three years. And then I took the job as head brewer at Church Brew Works for a while.

I was always looking for that next step and then I met with Paul Schneider (Cinderlands co-founder). It was just the right fit. They had this trajectory of growth in mind and what they wanted to accomplish. It just became a good working environment. I’ve helped them evolve some of their beer styles and ways of thinking and trying to stay ahead of what’s out there, instead of chasing what’s out there. Just keeping my eyes and ears open about what’s going on, but also trying to learn and work with my team and evolve. It’s been a good relationship and I’ve grown a lot with this company.

Q: I’ve always been amazed by the variety and quality Cinderlands produces. It’s not just about hazy IPAs or other trendy styles. It’s about traditional lagers or wood-aged beers or other classic styles. Has that always been the goal for the brewery?

A: With a wider variety, we want to reach the biggest amount of people possible. With the team I’ve helped bring on, some of the guys have pretty diverse backgrounds and what they’re passionate about, what their skills are. I think we’ve evolved into a team that can bring a lot to the table. I’ve been fortunate to surround myself with people who push us in pretty exciting directions. We have a guy here, along with myself, who is really passionate about lager. I’m passionate about clear IPA. I know that our persistence has kind of pushed us in that direction. There are people here who are really into mixed culture beers. We have people who bring a lot to the table. We have people who care about the liquid and I’m happy I’ve been able to surround myself with people who really push themselves in that right direction.

Q: Do you have any favorite Cinderlands beers?

A: As far as the every-day drinking beer, I would say Tracks Again (the brewery’s flagship German-style Pilsner) is a beer you can find all the time. We really pushed that beer in a very different direction. When we started, it was a more traditional German Pilsner. More recently, it’s developed into something like (Firestone Walker’s) Pivo Pils. It’s very aggressively kettle hopped. All of those aromatics. There is no dry hopping. But you get so much flavor from the hops, because we throw a lot of low alpha hops into the kettle. It’s a very complex, hoppy Pilsner without being dry hopped.

We’re trying to balance out our hoppy portfolio. So every time we release a hazy IPA, there is a West Coast-style IPA right behind it. When I first started here, I would say that 75 percent of the beers were hazy or a fruited sour or something like that. That number has come way, way down. It’s a reflection of the market, but I really think, in Pittsburgh at least, that we had a big part in pushing it in that direction. Our data also shows that. But it’s something I am really proud of.

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