Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part II

Late afternoon found me heading North-West along a stretch of US-40 I had driven before. I took it as far as Uniontown, PA, stopping along the way at General Braddock's grave. Even though I live within easy reach of Braddock Road in Alexandria, I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.

I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.

Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.

Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.

I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.

It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.