It feels like Covid 2.0' Pittsburgh businesses try to adjust to new reality as tariffs hit prices and profits

In a lot of ways it feels like Covid 2.0. So many things are getting disrupted so quickly.

- Heather Stewart

" Like many businesses across Donald Trump's America, Matt Katase's craft brewery, Brew Gentlemen, is having to contend with a bafflingly uncertain trading environment.

Alaina Webber, the brewery's chief operating officer, said: "For the first time, as a company in operation going on for 15 years, we've started to get explicit emails that say: 'On this existing order, you are now going to see a 30%, then to a 130% increase.'"

The brewery is based in Braddock, in the Allegheny valley, in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh where the Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill about 150 years ago, founding an industry that underpinned the industrialisation of America.

Today, the vast mill is still in operation, but the tariffs the US president claims will restore the glory of rust-belt towns such as this have inflicted chaos on thousands of firms across the region.

Anything imported carries a 10% levy; steel and aluminium, 25%; Chinese products, 145%. And much higher "reciprocal" tariffs on many other countries hang in the balance.

The brewery had to transform rapidly during the Covid pandemic, switching from selling beer to local people in its taproom to focusing 100% on manufacturing. Now, just as it hoped for a "normal" year, the cost of many ingredients in the brewing process is in flux.

Katase, a co-founder, said: "You can't instantly start growing New Zealand hops in America. We use a lot of American hops, but then we have beers that use Australian or New Zealand hops and we have malt that comes from Canada. If you're trying to make a traditional German lager, yeah, you kind of need German malt."

At the other end of town, outside the vast Edgar Thomson steel mill, workers gathered in a union social hall are reluctant to chat.