Pittsburgh Brewing Infuses New Beer With Immaculate Reception Football DNA

The Divinity Draft sounds like a marketer's dream: an all-malt amber pilsner brewed with a swab taken from arguably the most famous football in NFL history, the one Franco Harris caught off a deflection in Pittsburgh's 1972 playoff win over Oakland, the play that became known as the Immaculate Reception. Nemacolin Resort commissioned Pittsburgh Brewing Co. to make it, timed to the resort's Immaculate Reception Weekend around the April 23-26 NFL Draft. Before you reach for a can, though, it's worth asking what "DNA from a football" actually contributes to a finished beer, because the answer is almost certainly nothing.

Here's what the brewing process does to genetic material. Pittsburgh Brewing's brewmaster Mike Carota, with the brewery since 1975, "infused that swab into the liquid" during production, according to reporting on the beer. That liquid would have gone through a wort boil running around 212 degrees Fahrenheit for an extended period, which denatures and shreds DNA strands into fragments too small to carry any meaningful biological information. Fermentation follows, where the acidic, enzymatically active environment continues breaking down any macromolecules present. Filtration removes particulates. By the time the beer reaches a 16-ounce aluminum can, any traces of material from that football are fragmented, denatured, and diluted to concentrations that no analytical instrument would detect, let alone a drinker's palate. There's no food safety issue here; it's simply that the brewing process is a hostile environment for the kind of molecular storytelling the marketing implies.

The football itself has genuine provenance. It was held for five decades by West Mifflin's Jim Baker before being gifted to Nemacolin founder Joseph A. Hardy III on his 100th birthday. The resort now displays it on-site. Maggie Hardy, Nemacolin's owner and CEO, framed the release in suitably grand terms: "Football is woven into the very fabric of this region, and the Immaculate Reception Weekend is our tribute to that enduring legacy."

The Divinity Draft is brewed with two-row pilsner barley malt and crystal roasted malts, and it will be available exclusively at the Nemacolin property during the NFL Draft weekend, which also features a dinner with Terry Bradshaw and Jerome "The Bus" Bettis. Resort packages for two start at $10,000 and climb to $30,000 and beyond.

For homebrewers tempted to replicate the "terroir swab" concept, there is a legitimate version of this idea worth understanding. Wild and spontaneous fermentation in styles like lambic or coolship ale deliberately invites microbial life from the environment, living organisms including wild yeast and bacteria that actively transform wort. The key word is living. A swab of a half-century-old leather football carries dead or degraded cellular material, not viable organisms capable of influencing fermentation. Swabbing a surface and adding it to your kettle is not wild brewing; it's theater. If authentic microbial terroir interests you, a coolship left open overnight in your local environment or a spontaneous fermentation project using ambient yeast will actually deliver what the Divinity Draft only gestures at.

The beer's recipe sounds genuinely appealing on its own merits. A crisp, amber-colored pilsner from a brewery with 165 years of history behind it, brewed by a man who has been at the kettle since 1975, doesn't need a football swab to earn respect. The Immaculate Reception DNA is a story, not an ingredient.