Erika Turner has some advice for anyone considering opening a tasting room in 45 days: Don’t. “I don’t recommend it,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper. She can laugh about it now, for the most part. “I’m not recovered yet, but it’s OK.”
The mad dash began late last year, when Turner applied to the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership’s Project Pop-Up program with an idea she and her mother and business partner, Diane Turner, had been kicking around for years: Put different Black-owned beverage makers in the same room.
Turner brought in Marcus Wyatt of Windy Bridges Brew, whom she knew through Pittsburgh’s Barrel & Flow beer festival. The proposal got the green light. Then they had to turn a former yoga studio on Forbes Avenue into a tasting lounge in time for the NFL Draft…