The Story of Allegro Brewery

The Allegro Brewery story starts almost a lifetime ago.  President Carter had just passed the Homebrew Act of 1978 which allowed for the legal production of beer and wine for personal consumption by private citizens in their homes.  My dad (a physics professor) started brewing beer, calling it “Old Ploughboy” and claimed it was really great stuff.  Of course, I was too young to know about that.

A couple years later, in the early 1980s, he enlisted my brother and I to help bottle his beers as they became ready to drink.  We’d also make sodas—”pop” as we called them in Kansas—on the same bottling day.  It was my first introduction to fermentation science as well as the concept of making something for yourself for cheaper than what you could buy it for.

In college, I was that guy who would always buy different beers to try them out (although mostly with an eye to figuring out the best beer for your buck: the winner back then was Hamms.)  A few years later, I ended up brewing my first beer when I was 23 years old.  I was working as a truck driver making $8 per hour delivering produce and didn’t have the money to buy anything more than cheap beer.  

I know most guys my age liked beer back then, but for me it was deeper than that.  (Probably why I ended up a winemaker.)  I was trying to drink great beer on a budget.  Back then, “great beers” were Guinness and Moosehead and Anchor Steam and Warsteiner.  It was a very different landscape than today, more like a desert, and it’s what drove most homebrewers like myself.  

I ended up brewing around 30 batches of beer by the time I was 28, eventually graduating to all grain brewing (with a setup that probably totaled $75).  I’d spend 12 hours on a Saturday brewing beer to end up with four cases of beer I could be proud of and enjoy.  I joined the local homebrew club in State College called SCUM (stood for State College Underground Maltsters.)  I even ended up working once a week in a local homebrew store called Keystone Kettles (trading my time for ingredients.)

All this came to end an in 1998 when I found wine.  After my second weekend helping at Mount Nittany with their grape harvest, I realized that my beer-making days were behind me.  (Not my beer-drinking days, though.  It takes a lot of beer to make good wine.)
 

Then, perhaps around 2004 or 2005, when we were really struggling as a winery in Brogue, I entertained the idea of adding on a brewery to the winery here in Brogue.  At the time, the idea that a winery would have a brewery associated with it was unheard of.  We would have been the first in Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately, things were so tight for us that we didn’t have the funds nor the time to actually put the idea in to motion.

Fast-forward to 2020, and I realized we could pull it off.  After purchasing the old Naylor Wine Cellars in Stewartstown, I knew we had the space and capacity to add brewing to our operation.  And I knew that adding beer would provide an amazing synergy to our wines in that location.  We received our federal and state licenses that year, but due to pandemic and other factors we held off actually starting to make beer.

The last piece of the puzzle was finding a brewer, and it turned out I didn’t have to look far.  When people find out that we have kids, they always ask if they’re going to take over the winery at some point.  As any of you with kids know, we have never had any idea, nor did we ever want to push them in the winery direction.  But Dylan has been working in the vineyard and winery for the past few years, and the more I talked about brewing beer, the more he was interested in it.  This is a guy who cut his teeth on Reserve Chardonnays and Cadenzas and spends his weekends smoking and grilling meats (and catfish).  Brewing beer is simply a natural extension of good food and cooking.  

Cut to today, and he now knows way more about brewing than I do.  The beers that he is brewing for Allegro Brewery are better than any beers I ever made in my day.  My heart is still in winemaking, and I don’t have time to be a daily brewer in this lifetime.  It’s great to taste each new beer Dylan brews and to share them with everyone who thought that Allegro was only ever going to be about wine.  

Don’t hold your breath for the taproom.  We’re hoping to have it open sometime in 2025.  Until then, stop by regularly to check out the beers Dylan’s brewing up!