(Butler, PA) Cheers, Pioneers. Frontier Beer. Pioneer Beer. And, as a tribute to the former Oak Hills Golf Course upon which Butler County Community College has been educating students for nearly 60 years, Oakey-Doke.
Recon Brewing, Butler, creates a specialty beer to promote and support the work of two nonprofit organizations each year, an owner said, and has chosen the BC3 Education Foundation as a 2024 beneficiary.
A number of BC3 employees in the past month have bandied about names for the hazy pale ale whose proceeds will assist the college’s Pioneer Pantry through the BC3 Education Foundation.
Pioneer Spirit. Trail Ale. Trailblazer.
Mikayla Moretti, Jayme Steighner and Torey O’Donnell are BC3 employees and BC3 food security team members who help to coordinate the Pioneer Pantry.
“The creative process for the name was a lot of fun. We tossed around a bunch of different ideas.”
“The creative process for the name was a lot of fun,” said Moretti, interim director of fundraising and external relations with the BC3 Education Foundation. “We tossed around a bunch of different ideas.”
Moretti, Steighner, O’Donnell and other BC3 employees began pondering names after watching Recon Brewing owner Nathan Bacher and workers Evan Flannery and Jack Laughner begin the beer-making process by climbing three steps to a platform and to shake a measurement of hops into a boiling 300-gallon kettle July 30.
Trail Head. A Need for Mead.
“We were talking about something like Pioneer Pantry Pale Ale, making it a tongue-twister,” said Steighner, facilitator of BC3’s Keystone Education Yields Success program.
Happy Haze Ahead. PioBeer Proud.
“After hearing all the ideas, we tried to pick the one that best fit,” said O’Donnell, BC3’s associate director of student life for student activities. “That was interesting and challenging all at the same time.”
Ultimately, the Recon Brewing batch has been dubbed Graduate Pale Ale.
G.P.A. for short.
“Awesome,” Bacher said. “A perfect fit.”
“People might taste some mango. They might taste some strawberry. They might taste some bubblegum. They all blend in together.”
Recon Brewing has crafted nearly 13 kegs of the unique blend. Graduate Pale Ale is now available at the brewery’s location in Butler and will be sold beginning Sept. 10 at its sites in Bridgeville and in Cranberry Township.
Among Graduate Pale Ale’s ingredients are 300 pounds of Vienna malt, 100 pounds of malted oats, 25 pounds of carapils malt, 4 pounds of standard mosaic hops and 20 pounds of mosaic cryo hops “where a lot of the flavor is going to come from,” Bacher said.
The beer includes 5.5 percent alcohol, Bacher said, “so it’s a light-drinking beer, but it has the flavor of a much bigger IPA beer. I would categorize it as tropical with multiple flavors layered in. “People might taste some mango. They might taste some strawberry. They might taste some bubblegum. They all blend in together.”
Fifteen percent of sales of Graduate Pale Ale drafts will be allocated to the Pioneer Pantry. The two nonprofit organizations for which Recon Brewing blends a specialty beer each year are called karma tap recipients.
“We’ve done the karma tap since we opened,” Bacher said. “It’s our belief in what goes around comes around. We try to put out good karma into the world so maybe good karma comes back to us.”
Pioneer Pantry may help 1,000 this year
Food insecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is having reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet. The debut of the Pioneer Pantry five years ago followed a 2018 survey in which 38 percent of 304 BC3 student respondents indicated they experienced low or very low food security.
The pantry, located on BC3’s main campus in Butler Township, served 341 individuals in 2019-2020. It assisted more than 900 in 2023-2024 and is expected to help more than 1,000 in the current academic year, Moretti said.
The Pioneer Pantry provides canned, boxed and bagged foods, fresh vegetables, dairy products, frozen meats, products to seal and preserve food, and hygiene items for infants, Moretti said.
Grab-and-go stations at BC3’s additional locations in Armstrong, Butler, Jefferson, Lawrence and Mercer counties followed the debut of the Pioneer Pantry and provide free dry, bagged or canned food to students.
BC3 is in the process of purchasing refrigeration units funded through a portion of a state Department of Education grant to accommodate delivered fresh, cold and frozen foods for students at several of the college’s additional locations.
The grant, which followed BC3’s designation as a Hunger-Free Campus, has also helped to fund a new meal-voucher program for Pioneer Pantry patrons to use in the Pioneer Cafe on BC3’s main campus, according to college administrators.
“I am so excited that we were chosen by Recon and can raise funds for the pantry because our students utilize it so much.”
“Stories … hit home for us”
The Pennsylvania Commission for Community Colleges in 2022 reported that nearly 50 percent of the state’s community college students come from families earning less than $30,000 a year and are considered to be of very low income.
“To hear the stories about how many students are affected by food insecurity hit home for us,” Bacher said. “That’s a real issue. There are people who are trying to better themselves by going to college. They are going through that process and maybe not able to feed themselves.”
The number of area residents with empty food cupboards in their home “may be surprising to others,” said Steighner, who expects her KEYS program to assist up to 50 low-income students at BC3 this fall.
“You’re not going to do well in school if you are worrying about where your next meal is going to come from,” Steighner said, “or how you are going to feed your children who might be sitting next to you while you are studying.”
The Pioneer Pantry allows BC3 to “assist our students in ways that enable them to finish a degree or a certificate and possibly change the course of their life and the lives of their family members,” O’Donnell said.
“I am so excited that we were chosen by Recon and can raise funds for the pantry because our students utilize it so much.”
Graduate Pale Ale will be available while supplies last, Bacher said.
Recon Brewing’s taproom locations are at 1401 Hastings Crescent, Bridgeville; 1747 N. Main St. Ext., Butler; and 301 Tillary Lane, Suite A, Cranberry Township.
