Old Thunder Brewing Company
Josh Taylor, co-owner of Old Thunder Brewing Company, has a straightforward philosophy about beer: "Good beer is easy to make. Great beer is extremely difficult."
It's the kind of thing that sounds simple until you think about what it actually means — the obsession with water chemistry, sanitation, ingredient quality, the endless tasting and tweaking. The understanding that a beer is never really finished, just temporarily good enough. That level of craft doesn't show up on a tap list. It needs to be told.
That's what we set out to do with Old Thunder's marketing video.
How the project came together
Old Thunder is housed in a 1930s post office in Blawnox, a small borough just northeast of Pittsburgh. The building still has its original maple and terrazzo floors — features the owners kept deliberately, because the character of the space mirrors the character of the beer: traditional in spirit, with a modern edge. When Josh, Rob, and Zach were searching for a location, he said being in Blawnox just felt right.
We spent a full day on-site interviewing all three co-owners — about the brewery's origin, their brewing philosophy, and the beers they're most proud of. The origin story alone was worth capturing: Josh met Rob while he was bartending at Brew Gentlemen in Braddock, discovered Rob and Zach were roommates, and the three of them spent evenings and days talking through ideas over whiskey and beer until Old Thunder took shape. It's the kind of founding story that a logo can't communicate but an interview can.
Between the sit-down interviews, we captured footage of the brew day for their flagship IPA, False Kingdom — following the process from the initial stages through fermentation. A few weeks later, we returned for the canning run, capturing the full arc from raw ingredients to labeled cans moving down the line. That structure — brew day to canning day — gave the video a natural backbone and showed viewers something most people never get to see.
What made this shoot work
The taproom itself is a strong visual subject. The textured tile behind the bar, the worn industrial details, the tap handles, the quality of light coming through the windows — it's a space that photographs and films beautifully without needing much intervention. Our job was to find those details and let them breathe.
The interviews were the heart of it. Josh in particular is a natural on camera — direct, specific, and clearly someone who has thought hard about what he's doing and why. When he described False Kingdom — the oats and malted wheat, the Pacific Northwest hops, the water profile that softens the bitterness — it wasn't a sales pitch. It was a craftsman talking about work he cares about. That's the footage that makes someone want to drive out to Blawnox and order a pint.
On brewery video production
A brewery is one of the most video-friendly subjects in the craft beverage world. There's process to show — the brewing, the fermentation, the canning — and there's story to tell: who started it, why, what they believe about their product, how they think about their community. Old Thunder had all of that in abundance.
Josh talked about the Blawnox community showing up before the doors even opened, asking when they could finally come in. About regulars who come in weekly now, sit at the bar, and stay for conversation. That sense of place — a neighborhood brewery that belongs to its neighborhood — is exactly what video can carry that a website blurb can't.
Pittsburgh's craft beer scene has grown into something genuinely worth documenting, and we'd love to keep building that archive. If you run a brewery — in Pittsburgh or anywhere else — and you've been thinking about what a marketing video could look like for your taproom, your process, or your story, we'd be glad to talk.