On the afternoon of April 12, 2026 — Pittsburgh's celebrated 412 Day — Erika Turner and Marcus Wyatt opened the doors of Black Brew House for the first time, welcoming family and friends into a sun-drenched former yoga studio on Forbes Avenue. It was a private preview, but the moment carried unmistakably public weight: two of Pittsburgh's most pioneering craft beverage makers had joined forces downtown, and a new era in the city's nightlife had officially begun.
Black Brew House opened to the general public on April 22, just days before the 2026 NFL Draft flooded Downtown Pittsburgh with hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the country. The tasting room at 339 Forbes Ave. is a collaboration between Turner's TLC Libations — Pennsylvania's first Black, female-owned distillery — and Wyatt's Windy Bridges Brew, the first Black-owned brewery in Pittsburgh. Together, they serve beer, spirits, handcrafted cocktails, and non-alcoholic options. The menu extends beyond their own brands: Black Brew House intentionally showcases beverages from other Black entrepreneurs across Pennsylvania, making every visit a kind of statewide tour through an underrepresented corner of the craft beverage world.
"Two firsts — one roof. Black Brew House is what happens when Pittsburgh's trailblazers build together instead of building alone."
The Pittsburgh Wire
Turner's path to Forbes Avenue began in East Liberty, where she grew up and, while still in high school, wrote a business plan for a cocktail lounge. She earned an A on the project. Armed eventually with master's degrees in entrepreneurial studies and accounting, she made the plan real. TLC Libations, which she founded in 2017 alongside her mother Diane Turner, built its reputation on premium bottled and kegged cocktails — Old Fashioneds, Negronis, spiked teas and punches — before establishing a distillery and tasting room at 7800 Susquehanna St. in Homewood. When TLC Libations first opened, it was the only Black, female-owned distillery in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Wyatt's Windy Bridges Brew brought an equally consequential story to the partnership. As Pittsburgh's first Black-owned brewery, the brand has long been a fixture at city events and collaborative initiatives. Wyatt is an active participant in the Allegheny Mountain Malt Sustainable Sip-Off — a competition celebrating locally and regeneratively grown ingredients — and a key figure in Barrel & Flow, America's first Black-owned craft beer festival. Barrel & Flow holds its annual Pittsburgh edition in the Strip District each summer, and the festival's reach has expanded to include a New Orleans offshoot called Barrels on the Bayou. When Turner and Wyatt realized how much of their work was already overlapping, a shared space became the natural next step.
The building that houses Black Brew House was secured through the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership's Project Pop-Up, a program designed to activate vacant storefronts and draw foot traffic back into the urban core. The one-year pop-up agreement gives Turner and Wyatt time to establish the concept, build a customer base, and — if all goes well — convert to a long-term lease. The tasting room operates Thursday and Friday evenings from 6 to 10 p.m., and both Saturday and Sunday afternoons from noon onward, with a rotating lineup of food trucks rounding out each session.
For Pittsburgh, Black Brew House is more than a new place to raise a glass. It is evidence of a city reinventing its downtown not just architecturally, but culturally — making room for entrepreneurs whose stories reflect the full, varied breadth of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods and ambitions. Turner and Wyatt each built their respective brands in the city before bringing them together on Forbes Avenue. The result is a tasting room that pours from the past and the future in equal measure, and one that gives Pittsburgh's emerging downtown nightlife scene exactly the kind of anchor it has been looking for.