First off, the semi-official brewery of Pitt Blather is opening a new branch this weekend. Voodoo Brewery is opening another brewpub, Voodoo Homestead.
Voodoo Homestead — not a brewery or brewpub, but an unusual satellite pub selling just Voodoo brews — will open in a big chunk of the first floor of the former Homestead municipal building and fire station on East Ninth Avenue at Amity Street. The more-than-a-century-old, three-story building had been vacant for two decades when the borough approved selling it to Voodoo for $8,500 this past summer.
Since that time, the Voodoo crew has worked non-stop filling containers and containers with refuse, with a lot of that hard, dirty work being performed for free by volunteers, some of whom flew from distant cities to chip in.
Others volunteered to help decorate the decrepit but beautifully-boned building, gracing the vaulted ceiling with fanciful chalk artworks and colorfully painting the interior sides of two massive roll-up doors.
That’s why this weekend’s public opening was proceeded by a party for those volunteers, whose names are written in chalk behind the old-metal-barn-roofing-clad, 24-foot-long concrete-topped bar, right next to the chalked list of the beers that will be available to drink on premises or take home in growlers.
The article also gets into some of the lunacy of Pennsylvania liquor laws with the hoops Voodoo has to jump through for this. I realize every state is insane in their own unique ways with liquor laws, but Pennsylvania is a special kind of crazy.
