Four Points Brewing now open

doing carpentry but homebrewing hard. He has had plenty of time to test his recipes on Fourth Street customers for the past two years and was ready to start serving them the stuff before the taproom was quite ready. “It was killing me how long things were taking.”

He’s been pleased with how the beers have turned out on the five-barrel system, which the taproom overlooks. He appreciates all the help and education he’s getting from consultant Zack Colton. “The beers are coming out the way I thought they would. Impressing myself a little bit,” he adds with a little laugh.

His goal all along was not just to be a brewery in a relatively small Washington County town but rather, like the restaurant, to offer an experience like one might expect in the big city. “We want to give you here in Washington County what you drive to Pittsburgh for,” he says. “We really want to do relevant stuff and keep up with the trends.”

And in fact, lots of people have been driving the 40 minutes or more from Pittsburgh and beyond. (Mr. Boura still drives down on weekdays from Cheswick.)

Owner Mr. Barbe had wanted to open a brewery ever since he saw how well craft beer sold from his restaurant, which opened in 2013 and added craft beer about three years ago. Fortunately, his father also owned this adjacent building, which once was a flower shop. They included an upstairs room that can be used for performances and private events. The interior is all unfinished wood and exposed beams and brick and corrugated metal; the bar is clad with a mosaic of repurposed wood that Mr. Boura helped build after he quit his day job at the start of this year.

He’s all in. So apparently are customers, who are welcome to bring food over from Fourth Street or just drink the beer there. They’ve gradually been removing other beers from the chalkboard and replacing them with Four Points brews.

As Mr. Boura puts it, “They’re drinking