Folks can take a sip of Iron City history when they drink a new rye whiskey set for release in mid-June.
Old Faithful, a single barrel rye available June 14 from Iron City Distilling, is a limited-edition finished rye whiskey that merges Western Pennsylvania’s history in brewing and its future in distilling.
The 2-year-old rye was finished in a pre-Prohibition era wooden beer keg once used by Pittsburgh Brewing Company for Iron City Beer production. The more-than-a-century-old barrel was donated by a local collector in 2025, said Matt Strickland, Iron City’s master distiller.
“Because our sister company, Pittsburgh Brewing Co., has been around for 165 years, it’s incredibly well known in this part of the state,” Strickland said. “There’s all these collectors — we call them breweriana collectors.”
Breweriana aficionados collect everything from beer signs, old cans and old bottles to old office notes and receipts from their favorite beer company. Pittsburgh Brewing Co.’s Iron City Beer is no exception.
Strickland said collectors often give their wares to the East Deer distillery and brewery.
The beer keg donor, who asked not to be named, is a Pittsburgh-area native. He offered the keg to Iron City in hopes that the distillery could use it for some type of whiskey production.
“I said ‘well yeah, that’d be kind of cool,’” Strickland told TribLive.
The restoration
Strickland said he was fascinated the barrel had lived a full lifetime before reaching the distillery. The fact it held Iron City Beer, survived Prohibition and is now part of Iron City’s whiskey is a rare feat.
The challenge, he said, was finding a cooperage — a workshop where coopers make wooden barrels — that could revive the barrel.
Because it had been sitting without liquid in it for so long, the wood was extremely dried out by the time it made its way to the distillery. Strickland said it was otherwise in pretty good shape.
The barrel was sent to the Barrel Mill in Minnesota to be restored.
“It took them about six weeks,” Strickland said. “It took them a while to basically break it down, open it up, shave it out, rechar it and get it to hold liquid again.”
Throughout the restoration process, workers at the Barrel Mill began referring to the keg as “Old Faithful,” a nickname that inspired the whiskey’s title.
Strickland said the keg seemed to become a passion project for the cooperage. They even crafted a custom chest to hold the barrel during shipping.
“They told us they couldn’t just send it back on a pallet,” said Peter Katz, Iron City Distilling president.
The chest caused quite the stir within the company. Distillers and other company workers began hiding the chest in different areas of the distillery, priming the question, “what’s in the box?”
The test run
Once restored, the approximately 15-gallon barrel was filled with Iron City Distilling’s 2-year Straight Bessemer Rye Whiskey.
“We didn’t really know what was going to happen,” Strickland said. “We were kind of taking a little bit of a leap.”
He said the distillers still aren’t sure what kind of wood the barrel is made of.
Due to barrel’s smaller size, the whiskey developed character quickly, as more liquid came into contact with the oak during finishing. The barrels Iron City usually uses in the distilling process are around 53 gallons.
After three weeks, the first batch was dumped and evaluated.
“It was tasting really good,” Strickland said.
Wanting to see if the keg had more life in it, Strickland and his team repeated the process twice more, ultimately completing three separate finishing runs through the historic barrel. The third run stayed in the barrel for about six weeks.
The flavor
The result of the distillery’s efforts is a whiskey that carries rich, dark, woody tones to an overall peppery and herbaceous rye, Strickland said.
“It was really cool,” Strickland said. “It was something that honestly, you just have to try. It was really neat.”
The distillery was able to get a few more barrels from the same era after Old Faithful was produced. After getting the barrels restored, the company intends to make pre-Prohibition releases an annual practice.
The distillery will be selling around 140 bottles of Old Faithful on June 14, National Bourbon Day, at Iron City Distilling’s gift shop in East Deer and online. The rye will be sold in Iron City’s new custom bottles, Katz said.
For more information about the sale, visit icdistilling.com.