PHILOSOPHY
Owner Mike Naessens has channeled the Old World with a cozy but not too cramped “brown bar” feel. In particular, his bar seems to be a manifestation of the quizzical nature of Belgians, who love dark humor as much as they love strong beer. With that in mind, make sure to check the upstairs “coffin room.”
KEY BEER
On tap, the tart-sweet Duchesse de Bourgogne, a 6.2% ABV Flanders Red Ale from Brouwerij Verhaeghe is the perfect choice to go with an order of garlic and leek crab cakes.
THE 700 CLUB
700 N. 2nd St. • Philadelphia, PA 19123 (215) 413-3181 • the700.org • Established: 1997
SCENE AND STORY
This Northern Liberties hangout is without a doubt one of the happiest and most cheerful places in Philly to drink craft brews. With its easygoing bar staff, vinyl-spinning DJ, solid tap row and bottle list, and reputation for sweaty late-night weekend dance parties (the Rutger Hauer Power Hour is held on the fourth Wednesday of each month to get you in the mood), it manages to exude good vibes without really trying, and its laid-back clientele is made up of a menagerie of local artists, musicians, and writer types, more often approachable than not.
PHILOSOPHY
Dog-friendly. No bouncer, no attitude, no cover. Just good people, good tunes, and usually a soccer game on the tube.
KEY BEER
There are ten drafts and two casks, plus a big old vintage refrigerator full of crafts in bottles. Philadelphia Brewing Company’s Kenzinger Kölsch will keep the party local and, and at just 4.5% ABV, rolling strong.
THE BELGIAN CAFÉ
601 N. 21st St. • Philadelphia, PA 19130 (215) 235-3500 • thebelgiancafe.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
Blackboard with an ever-changing tap list. Check. Wooden bar with an armrest lip and a brass pipe foot rail. Check. Elegant back bar and mirrors stacked with glassware. Check. Located in the arty, affluent Fairmont neighborhood, this is one of Monk’s Café founder Tom Peters’s many establishments (this one a joint venture with fellow Philly publican Fergus Carey), and it has the deep Belgian beer list and nourishing haute-rustic pub menu to match their legendary appetites. But unlike Monk’s (most of the time, at least), it lacks constant crowds, and with its amber-hued walls, lustrous dark wood and wainscoting, and classic Victor Horta–style flourishes, the bar possesses an uncanny resemblance to good beer bars in Brussels. Peters even commissioned a local artist to do a series of five art nouveau–style paintings in the main dining room area, and they infuse the space with a color and energy not found in many beer bars anywhere. The chef is serious about cooking with beer—even tofu dishes are marinated in it—and standout dishes include the vegan barbecue wings, wasabi-dusted sea scallops served with Duvel beure blanc (Duvel is a classic strong Belgian golden ale), and the Monk’s Burger, with caramelized leeks and bleu cheese.
PHILOSOPHY
This is a classic, dark, cozy bar, with excellent food and drink on offer, and a serious but not needlessly pedantic approach to beer. It would make a great lunch spot or venue for catching up with an old friend.
KEY BEER
Glazen Toren brewery’s Ondineke (on tap) is a yeasty, deeply golden triple from Belgium that tastes of grass, spice, and apricot, deceptively light for a beer of 8.5% ABV, and a great match with mussels.
THE GREY LODGE PUBLIC HOUSE
6235 Frankford Ave. • Philadelphia, PA 19135 • (215) 856-3591 • greylodge.com • Established: 1996
SCENE & STORY
Opened with a distinctive oval bar in the 1950s (under a different name) this Northeast Philly institution has dark red walls and dark-stained wood trim throughout, with an old-school first-floor bar (dart boards and flat-screens) and a more quiet and updated second-floor dining room and whiskey-stocked bar, which also has eight taps of its own. More than familiar pub stylings, though, it possesses a hefty dose of Philly heart, less easily quantifiable but undeniably part of the character. That means that locals rule the roost here but in a good-hearted way for the most part. Events take on a quirky feel, with “Quizzo” on Wednesdays, Friday the Firkinteenth (any Friday the 13th) being dedicated to twenty-five or more firkins on draft, and Groundhog Day, when everyone shows up in Hawaiian shirts and gets well and duly hammered. The food options earn raves, especially the wild boar tacos and cheesesteak.
PHILOSOPHY
This is a beer bar with a bit of edge and off-kilter personality with serious beer cred to boot. Be sure to check out the restrooms, which are elaborately tiled in red, green, and blue mosaics with various bon mots. Beer lists are published online under the rubrics “currently on tap,” “on deck,” “due in this week,” and “barrels being saved for a special night,” which helps stoke anticipation for return visits, while tap lines are ceremoniously cleaned on Mondays in front of patrons. Attention all beer bar owners: please follow Grey Lodge’s example and do the same.
KEY BEER
There are eleven taps and a cask, plus forty or so bottles and fourteen cans available. Look for nearby New Jersey’s Flying Fish, which always has a seasonal release available, or Victory’s eminently sessionable Dark Lager.
MEMPHIS TAPROOM
2331 E. Cumberland St. • Philadelphia, PA 19125 • (215) 425-4460 • memphistaproom.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
Four words: beer-battered kosher dills. That’s just one of the delicious bites that makes this Kensington area pub shine, along with ten beer-geek-approved taps (always rotating brands) and a beer engine for cask ales. Top rank offerings range from rarities such as De Ranke to Bear Republic and Ridgeway. A co-owner is the outspoken former Khyber Pass barman Brendan “Spanky” Hartranft, who also operates Local 44, making him, like Tom Peters, Will Reed, and Fergus Carey, one of the prime movers in Philly’s good beer scene. Starting a craft beer bar in a tough neighborhood wasn’t easy. “It was a total renovation; it took four months,” recalls Hartranft. “My dad was on the ladder doing some electrical work about three weeks into it one day, and this guy comes over and grabs the bottom of the ladder and goes, ‘Drop your wallet or I’m pulling out the ladder.’ My dad goes, ‘Uh, no,’ pulls out his hammer, and drops it right on the guy’s head. Skull fracture—we called the cops and an ambulance. After that, everyone that had been walking by calling us a yuppie bar beforehand were starting to say, ‘Hey, when are you guys opening up?’”
PHILOSOPHY
The bar is “on a mission” to prove that certain dusty, aged bottles of beer deserve equal respect, if not more, than brewery-fresh bottles, and has the deep menu of options to prove it. When the weather cooperates, there’s a hearty beer garden scene popping up.
KEY BEER
Oude Beersel Geuze, a lemony-tart, dry geuze with funky notes of unripened fruit.
LOCAL 44
4333 Spruce St. • Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 222-2337 • local44beerbar.com • Established: 2009
SCENE & STORY
Ever since Brendan Hartranft and his wife, Leigh, opened this gem of a beer bar in the leafy Port Richmond area of West Philly on New Year’s Day in 2009, it has been busy. With its deep-red walls, Edison bulbs, and metal fire door, the space is striking and enveloping. The goal was to create a welcoming, upscale dark bar with twenty taps, each with a distinct style. The well-made fare is “boardwalk cuisine”: riffs on comfort food like corn-dogs, Reuben sandwiches, and mahi-mahi fish tacos. Lately the staff has been doing limited edition collab beers with area breweries as one-offs for the bar.
PHILOSOPHY
No pretense here. Just good beer and a fair shake. “My price structure is based on what my dad would think if he came in here,” says Hartranft. In other words, he tries to keep it affordable, and even opened up the bar with the precious Cantillon Lou Pepe kriek on draft for a mere eight dollars (it is often sold for twelve or thirteen dollars).
KEY BEER
The international list of rarities changes daily, but one beer is
always available no matter what: Orval, a Belgian Trappist “world classic.” It is, in fact, the only bottled beer for sale at Local 44. And if you get a chance to ask Hartranft about his passion for this beer, be prepared for some colorful commentary. It’s a beer that inspires, to say the least.
MONKS CAFÉ & BELGIAN BEER EMPORIUM
264 S. 16th St. • Philadelphia, PA 19102 (215) 545-7005 • monkscafe.com • Established: 1997
SCENE & STORY
In the religion of Seinfeld, Monk’s Café—the fictional coffee shop where the main characters gather—is its tabernacle, the cherished brick-and-mortar corner of the universe where Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer and some of their most memorable stories unfold and intertwine. In a way, one could say the same thing about the real-life Monk’s Café: it’s a tabernacle for craft beer lovers—it even has its own “Beer Bible”—but Fergus Carey and Tom Peters’s Center City Philadelphia version has far superior food. Among the best-known beer bars in the United States—along with San Francisco’s Toronado and Portland’s Horse Brass—Monk’s Café is more than a tavern where beer is served. It’s an institution, and as such, it’s to be visited with planning and forethought.
To have the best experience, try Monk’s on a weeknight or during the day on weekends, or be prepared for a wait of an hour or two.
But that wait, should you have to endure it, is worthwhile: what beer travelers find when they come here is a narrow, wood-paneled front bar area with fabric-covered walls, then an area of a few snug booths and some smaller tables. Assorted breweriana and maps and paintings are carefully displayed throughout; beyond the middle dining area is the darker back bar, with more elegant wood paneling and a different tap list. The crowd is made up of Philly locals, beer pilgrims, and the odd musician in town for a gig. Recent artists to stroll in include Danger Mouse, James Mercer, and members of both Beirut and Broken Bells. It’s surely one of the only craft beer bars in the country that can claim Questlove, drummer of the Roots, as a regular.
Beer is the main focus, but not by much. Food options run the gamut from the delicious, wing-style frog legs to mussels steamed in Saison Dupont beer with parsley, caramelized leeks, bacon, bleu cheese, and garlic. Beer options are extensive, naturally, which is where the twenty-page “Beer Bible” comes in: Besides the six taps in the front bar and eight in back, it adds some 200 rarities to your decision-making process.
PHILOSOPHY
La vie Belgique. Any beer traveler knows, as Belgians have proven, that a great beer café can be the lifeblood of local community. With Monk’s, Carey and Peters have created a gathering place for lovers of craft beer, and sometimes their causes. When the late, great beer writer Michael Jackson—a regular visitor to Monk’s and dear friend of Peters—died in 2007, Peters was among the organizers of a nationwide toast to raise money for Parkinson’s (the illness that Jackson battled bravely and privately for ten years before his death).
KEY BEER
In search of the perfect proprietary ale, Peters traveled to Van Steenberge, the last brewery in the Meetjesland (East Flanders) region of Belgium, where Monk’s Café Flemish Sour, his superb, ruddy-red house beer, would be born. At 5.5% ABV it’s a Flemish Oud Bruin–style ale, aged in oak and fabulously complex, with wild but pleasing blasts of leather, tart fruit, and woody tannins. “I told [Van Steenberg’s brewers] the basic parameters I was looking for. I wanted a sour beer with not much sweetness. I wanted a relatively light body, with low to moderate alcohol, a thirst quencher in the summertime,” says Peters. He got it. You should, too.
A BEER WITH
MONK’S CAFÉ’S TOM PETERS
In the early 1980s, during the protoplasmic days of Belgian beer appreciation (Merchants du Vin and Vanberg Dewulf had only started bringing in their specialties in 1978, and then only in bottles), Tom Peters began converting one local drinker at a time to Belgian ales. One fateful evening at a bar called Café Nola on South Street, Peters promised a couple of patrons he’d pay for a bottle of Chimay Grand Reserve out of his own pocket if they didn’t like it. He’d tried the delicious, tawny brown ale at the recommendation of a barman in Brussels in 1984, and, electrified by its flavors, worked on getting it into his bar, despite the owner’s concerns that the brew would fizzle. By the end of the first night he’d sold the whole box, and though he’d failed to keep one for himself (“I’ll never make that mistake again,” he quipped), a movement was born. Eventually Peters would help bring in a number of Belgian specialties to the United States for the first time ever in kegs, including such iconic brews as Kwak, Houblon Chouffe, Lindeman’s, and Corsendonk. When a craft beer lover goes into a bar and sees native Belgian beers actually on tap, Peters is the man to toast.
Peters wasn’t always obvious craft beer material, as it were. A dedicated long-distance runner and drummer, he first tried the law, then military life. By the time Philly beer culture came alive in the late 1980s and 1990s—Stoudt’s, Penn Brewing, and Dock Street were all ramping up production, as was Home Sweet Homebrew, an incubator of later talents like Bill Covaleski of Victory—Peters was making plans for Monk’s, which he opened with his friend and business partner Fergus Carey in 1997. A couple of years before, he’d brought in a pallet of Kwak beer kegs to a bar called Copa Too!, his next managing gig after Café Nola, and they’d sold like hotcakes. The vision for Monk’s was vividly apparent. Today their bar sells vast quantities of Belgian beer, and his cellar is easily one of the biggest repositories of rare Belgian ales anywhere in the world. In 2004, he was made a Knight of Honor in Chevalerie du Fourquet des Brasseurs, the 400-year-old Belgian brewers’ guild, in Brussels, and one of the only Ambassadeurs d’Orval in the United States, an honor extended by the famed Belgian Trappist brewery.
Philly, with its blue-collar roots and deep beer history, was the perfect town for Peters to help cultivate the Belgian ale craze, which continues unabated. “The beer culture runs really deep for the whole country, but I think it runs deeper in Philadelphia than anywhere else,” says Peters. “There’s no other city in the world that has the current beer culture we have here. You can go to any restaurant, new or established. Or to the Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park, and you can find good beer at almost every stand.” Today he marvels at the new generation of beer drinkers and brewers who started with unusual craft beers right off the bat, and wonders where they’ll take the genre—and the market share—for craft brewing. “I think the possibilities are limitless,” he says in all seriousness.
With typical humility, the affable Peters is quick to share kudos with others. He points out that bar manager Chris Morris at Khyber Pass was already selling good beers when he had his own aha! moment. “A lot of credit has to go to Craig LaBan, too, our Philadelphia Inquirer food reviewer,” adds Peters. “He’s into beer, and every time he reviews any restaurant he talks about the beer selection, so nobody will dare to open without giving serious consideration to beer.”
When you get to Monk’s Café, and you have to if you love Belgian beer and food, look for Tom, who may be, if the night is winding down, sipping an Orval or his house beer. He is still enthralled with what has unfolded around him: Belgian beer is more than an oddity now, it’s practically a new norm of eating and drinking. “I love my bar,” he says. “You have people in New York and all these cities that have the same passion I have and they can’t get the culture to take hold. Well, maybe now they can, but twenty-five years ago it wasn’t working.” But then again, it was never about fashion at Monk’s, nor was it about Tom. It was about keeping good company. “I never look at trends. You know, I taste something that I like and then I want to share it with somebody.”
SOUTH PHILADELPHIA TAP ROOM
1509 Mifflin St. • Philadelphia, PA 19145 (215) 271-SPTR (7787) southphiladelphiataproom.com • Established: 2003
SCENE & STORY
Just the words “South Philly Tap Room” have a good ring. With fourteen taps along the lines of California’s sought-after Russian River, Founders
and Sly Fox, this well-established corner bar deep in South Philly sponsors “Meet the Brewer” nights (Rob Tod, of Allagash, was a recent guest) and earns notice for its upmarket bar food, like a ten-dollar grass-fed bacon cheeseburger.
PHILOSOPHY
Neighborhood hangout with the best possible beer and beloved bar food.
KEY BEER
Stoudt’s Karnival Kolsch, a crisp 4.8% ABV beer with a light body and dry finish.
McGILLIN’S OLDE ALE HOUSE
1310 Drury St. • Philadelphia, PA 19107 (215) 735-5562 • mcgillins.com • Established: 1860
SCENE & STORY
Philly’s oldest continuously operating pub and one of this country’s best Irish pubs, McGillin’s opened as the Bell in Hand during the waning days of the Buchanan administration (the only U.S. president from Pennsylvania, alas). Its name came from William McGillin, the publican who ran the place and lived with his thirteen children upstairs. Crammed with dark wood paneling and exposed beams, brewery signs, parade bunting, iron chandeliers, plaques, and bric-a-brac, it’s everything you’d hope to see in a 150-year-old pub. Which is exactly why an episode of the hit show Drunk History was filmed there recently.
PHILOSOPHY
Hey, where ya from? Friendly and sometimes a bit wild.
KEY BEER
Try a McGillin’s IPA, brewed for the pub by Stoudt’s, which also brews a real ale and lager for this Philly institution. Other craft standout taps include Yard’s, Flying Fish, Victory, Sly Fox, and Dogfish Head.
DOCK STREET BREWING CO.
701 S. 50th St. • Philadelphia, PA 19143 (215) 726-2337 • dockstreetbeer.com • Established: 1985
SCENE & STORY
Built in the historic Cedar Park neighborhood, Dock Street was Philadelphia’s first craft brewery and one of the earlier firms to get up and running nationwide. Housed in an historic firehouse, the taproom/pizzeria is known for being a beacon of friendliness in a slightly sketchy neighborhood.
The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition) Page 36