Father Pitt

Eberhardt & Ober was one of Pittsburgh’s favorite beers for many years—E & O, for “Early and Often,” as the advertisements put it. (What a cheery slogan—and yet one that would probably not be tolerated today.) The building is a fine example of German-American brewery architecture.

Mr. Eberhardt and Mr. Ober were not only business partners, but also friends for life—and even beyond life.

Though Eberhardt & Ober conscientiously brewed beer to the strict German standards of purity, the beer that comes out of this building now is probably better than anything E & O ever produced. This is now the home of the Penn Brewery, which—in addition to making some very good beer—operates a restaurant serving the kind of German food that makes beer sing.

The buildings you see here are on Vinial Street, which is the arbitrary dividing line on city planning maps between East Allegheny and Troy Hill. No sane Pittsburgher would call this Troy Hill, though, or say that the brewery is in a different neighborhood from the bottling plant a few yards across the street. By any reasonable standard, the brewery is in Dutchtown—which, fortunately, is not an official neighborhood name, and so can have any arbitrary boundaries common usage would like to assign to it.

Addendum: The architect of the buildings was Joseph Stillburg, one of our most successful mid-Victorian architects. Many of his buildings are gone, but his influence on Pittsburgh architecture was huge. Teenage Frederick Osterling worked in Stillburg’s office, where he would have seen firsthand how to manage the kind of large architectural operation that his own practice later became.