March 16–23, 2000

cover story

Brew Hub

	photo: Michael LeGrand

by Brian Howard

It’s about 3 on a Friday afternoon at Yards Brewery in Manayunk. Love is in the air.

Not just because it’s Love Stout day, with an informal gathering of friends, writers and fellow beer geeks on hand to celebrate Yards’ new batch of Love Stout, a.k.a. Oyster Stout.

Not just because the title ingredient is a reputed aphrodisiac that soaked for about 20 minutes in the brew the revelers are now drinking.

And not because the 20 or so casually dressed guests are slurping down those very same oysters along with the beer (actually a light stout with only a hint of mollusk-ular saltiness).

No, the love that’s creating a buzz at Yards these days — and, more to the point, driving sales — is the world’s newfound respect for Philadelphia beers.

The national media announced and pronounced dead the microbrew craze several years ago. But area breweries that were once little more than hobbies are growing up.

For instance, Yards owner/brewer Tom Kehoe first started brewing beer in his college dorm room at Western Maryland College. With an investment of about $28,000, he launched Yards in a cramped Manayunk shed about the size of a mobile home in 1995, turning out 600 barrels (a barrel is equal to about two kegs) in two varieties. In 1997 he invested $350,000 in the present facility; the company now produces 2,200 barrels a year in 10 styles.

According to Kehoe, 35, a soft-spoken but jovial boulder of a man, "It was easy to see that once we started, the potential was there right away."

Other local success stories include breweries Stoudt’s (Adamstown), Victory (Downingtown), Flying Fish (Cherry Hill, NJ), Dogfish Head (Lewes, DE) and Weyerbacher (Easton), joining in on a movement foreordained by more established entities like Dock Street and Poor Henry’s. Local brewpubs like Nodding Head in Center City and Newark, DE’s Iron Hill are also part of the equation.

According to no higher authority than renowned beer expert Michael Jackson, this convergence of hops and barley brokers has made Philadelphia "one of the best beer cities in the country right now."

In his 1998 book Ultimate Beer Jackson notes, "The state of William Penn was once the heart of German brewing in the U.S. It bids to be so again."

As a result, Philadelphians are drinking more and more local beer… and we’re not just talking about Yuengling.

We’ve been here before. As early as colonial times Philadelphia was a brew hub.

"Philadelphia was the center of brewing in the new world for over 100 years. This was it. This was an early settlement, you had Swedes and Germans and British all here. They all brewed," explains Jim Anderson while knocking back pints of Dogfish Head Chicory Stout at Old City sugar refinery turned bar Sugar Mom’s. Anderson, a beer drinker, philosopher and all-around good guy, is the publisher of Beer Philadelphia, a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the cult and culture of "better beer" drinkers.

In the early days, folks drank beer as much for sustenance as for ye olde colonial social lubricant. "It wasn’t so recreational back then, because you didn’t have pasteurization and germ theory. You can’t drink the water because as soon as people settle they start pissing in the water supply and poisoning themselves, but if they drink booze, it’s OK. Boiling it and putting some alcohol in it usually takes care of it."

Though thousands of advancements have been made since beer was first brewed, the process remains relatively simple. The thumbnail recipe: You need a sugar, usually in the form of a grain like barley or wheat (but everything from corn to pumpkin to honey has sufficed). This grain/sugar is mixed with water and yeast. The yeast eats or ferments the mixture, breaking the sugar down into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Flavoring is added, usually in the form of hops, but you can add whatever you like — oysters, for instance. Different roasting techniques (slightly higher temperatures produce darker beers), types of yeast (top-fermenting yeast produces ales, porters and stouts while bottom-fermenting yeast produces lagers), brewing duration and temperature all give you slightly different results.

There’s really nothing that goes into beer that’s bad for you. Beer is a nutritious drink; moderation is the key.

"This pint of beer has probably got 500 percent of the U.S. RDA of complex B vitamins. And an unfiltered beer probably has double it. That’s some happy stuff," Anderson smiles, holding the deep red stout up to the light. "There was this brewery in Washington state who dared to put a nutritional information panel on their six-pack carrier. The feds were all over their shit about it immediately. [Breweries are not allowed to put nutritional information on their beer.] But some of these things squeaked out and it was like bang bang bang bang: zero fat, zero cholesterol, less calories than most people thought, folic acid, little bit of protein."

It’s widely held that the very first agriculturists were nomads who settled down to cultivate barley. It was long assumed that they used barley for bread. But research done by University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Dr. Solomon H. Katz suggests that they weren’t making bread at all, but beer. Beer keeps longer than bread, is packed with nutrients and contains protein because of the yeast. (Yeast was resident on the grain; early brewers weren’t aware of what was making the fermentation happen actually and assumed it was magic.)

"Katz turned the world on its head," marvels Anderson. "There’s no gluten in barley so you can’t make a good piece of bread out of it.… And so his thing, and I think that it’s probably widely accepted if not universally believed, is that dudes were making beer, and that’s why they stopped walking around."

Daily special: Northern Liberties’ Standard Tap offers only local beers, only on tap, all the time. photo: Mike LeGrand

It’s unclear whether Katz has researched the evolution of the beer gut, but billions served will attest that a good brewsky definitely inspires a sedentary lifestyle.

Philadelphia’s just bubbling over with beer history. According to the book Real Beer and Good Eats by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly, first prez George Washington, also a homebrewer, so fancied a porter made by Philadelphian Robert Hare that he made special requests to have it on hand when he retreated to Mount Vernon during recesses of Congress.

It probably left some nasty stains on the wooden teeth, but what an endorsement. And the tradition carried on from there. As recently as the dawn of the 20th century, there were nearly 100 breweries in Philadelphia County, "which was a lot smaller than it is now, and these were big breweries," explains Anderson.

Things were flowing smoothly until Prohibition. Those who could afford to sweat it out, did. When Prohibition was itself prohibited, the few American breweries left standing, like Anheuser-Busch, had access to railroads and refrigeration, which allowed them to ship farther and grow exponentially.

As if Prohibition weren’t bad enough, it paved the way for Spuds MacKenzie. It led to a dark period during which Americans partook of consistent but consistently bland beers made by only a few big companies. In the process, beer has seen its somewhat noble image as Everyman’s drink fall — thanks to ad campaigns featuring bikini teams and talking lizards — to the frowned-upon status of drink of the common man.

part 2