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High Steaks
With excellent food and a lively atmosphere, Chops is becoming the place to meat and greet.
-Maxine Keyser

December 19-25, 2002

food

drinktank

by Brian Howard

Very quietly, Philadelphia's only operating brewery has assembled a dream team. With spacious new digs and the addition of some of the city's most knowledgeable beer minds to an already knowledgeable staff, Yards Brewing Company is bubbling forth.

Founded in 1994 in a 900-square-foot shack in Manayunk, the brewery moved in March into the 40,000-square-foot shell of the old Weisbrod & Hess brewery in Kensington. Nancy Barton, who, with Tom Kehoe, forms the Yards brain trust, spotted the building's bottling department sign and knew instantly it'd be Yards' new home. It hadn't housed a brewery since Weisbrod & Hess shuttered its doors in 1939.

You might figure operating a smallish company brewing award-winning British- and Belgian-style ales would make more sense in the gentrified Manayunk and Roxborough (where the brewery had moved in 1997) areas. But many nearby bars, some of whom even served Yards' brews, had no idea the brewery was in the neighborhood.

Strangely, things have been wonderfully different for these Philly craft brewers at the corner of Amber and East Hagert streets, perhaps the epicenter of Philadelphia's "Budweiser country." With help from the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, Barton, Kehoe and company have found their new neighborhood more than welcoming. They've added several new accounts in the area, and the proximity to Center City makes the owners' two or three obligatory nightly business calls much easier.

The 10,000-barrel capacity dwarfs the Roxborough facility's 3,000 barrels, and so far Yards is only using 6,000 of the building's 40,000 available square feet. (They currently rent out two of the facility's three buildings.) To fill out the new digs, Yards has brought erstwhile Khyber bar manager Chris Morris and former Dock Street brewer Josh Ervine into the fold. While it might not signal a return to the days when hundreds of breweries thrived within city limits, the moves go a long way toward ensuring this one should stick around for awhile.

Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant (www.ironhillbrewery.com) in West Chester hosts Anchor Brewing Company and Andy Musser on Dec. 20. Back in October, readers of U.S. Airways' Attache magazine got the scoop on Pennsylvania's burgeoning brewing industry. Featured prominently in the article was Downingtown's fine Victory brewing (www.victorybeer.com). Congrats.

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