Dominic Cincotta began brewing his own beer with his friends Jeff and Caitlyn Hanna in 2009.
By 2012, they had honed their craft enough to sell their brews to local restaurants and bars. Their home base was the Hannas’ garage in their Highland Park home.
“It’s a process of experimentation,” Cincotta said. “We had a lot of leeway because we were working with a small system and craft beer was fairly unknown at that time.”
After more than 10 years of brewing and transporting kegs all over Pittsburgh, Cincotta and the Hannas have opened CoStar Brewing in Etna.
During their time selling to local bars and restaurants, Cincotta said that a search for a place of their own resulted in a lot of dead ends until they bought the land for CoStar in Etna in 2017. They had already made friendships in the borough by going door-to-door and speaking with local business owners about their feelings about a brewery entering the community. Cincotta said that Etna’s borough manager, Mary Ellen Ramage, gave him the tip about the available lot.
“We wanted to approach buying a building from a community angle,” Cincotta said. “We love Etna. The location is perfect. It was the place we were eyeing and we were really hoping that we would be able to move in.”
The CoStar team ended up combining two neighboring plots of land, one bought from the borough and the other from a private owner, and built the brewery from the ground up. On Feb. 24, CoStar Brewing opened to the public for an unannounced grand opening weekend.
Cincotta said the brewery will continue the slow opening each Saturday and Sunday until they are fully staffed and can keep a more regulated schedule.
“We’re adding some new employees which should allow us to open up on Fridays,” he said. “We’ll do that for a couple weeks until we can add Thursdays and then the rest of the days with expanded hours.”
He said that while they had spent years experimenting with their creations, they didn’t get into any “crazy beers.”
“We really just wanted to have something that you would want to drink after a long day at work,” he said.
After the brewery is up and running on a more regulated schedule, Cincotta said they are planning to host food truck nights. Updates about CoStar Brewing’s hours of operation can be found at costarbrewing.com or on their Facebook page.
