Beer. Here.

Some claim Philly's beer scene is the best in the nation. Not so fast, say others. Can the city's first-ever Beer Week settle the issue?

by Tim Hyland

Michael T. Regan

Just before noon on a recent sunny but crisp Saturday, a ragged line of people snaked from the entrance of General Lafayette Inn & Brewery all the way through the parking lot and right out to the street. There must have been a hundred of them. Standing, smoking, shivering.

Then a yellow school bus pulled up and dropped off even more. They got in line, too.

It was February, and it was cold, but nobody seemed to mind the wait. They were there for a reason.

Beer.

The occasion was the second annual WinterFest beer festival at General Lafayette, a creaky, two-centuries-old restaurant, tavern and brewpub in suburban Lafayette Hill, just a short drive from the city line, that, over the past few years, has developed into one of Philadelphia's brewing hot spots.

Inn brewmaster Chris Leonard hosted the event, but invited his competition, too: breweries from across the Delaware Valley and beyond, including local favorites Victory Brewing Co., Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Flying Fish Brewing Co. and a handful of others. They'd come to put their best winter beers up against Leonard's.

And those folks stuck in line, suffering? You could call them the judges. Unofficial judges, but worthy judges nonetheless.

After all, they were Philly beer drinkers. And as most anyone who claims to know anything about beer will tell you, Philadelphia is one of the greatest beer-drinking, beer-knowing, beer-loving cities in America.

Some say it's the best.

"This is a beer hotbed," says Tom Peters, owner of Monk's Café and one of the pioneers of Philadelphia's beer renaissance. "When importers introduce a new beer, we get it [in Philadelphia] first, and sometimes we drink it all before it can go anywhere else. That's actually happened."

And so it is fitting that, starting March 7, Philadelphia will play host to what even some out-of-towners believe may be the biggest, most varied beer event in recent American history: Philly Beer Week. A 10-day celebration of all things beer, Philly Beer Week will feature more than 100 events in the city and suburbs, including tastings of local, regional, national and global brews; beer-themed brunches and dinners; and seminars on everything from the how-tos of home brewing to the beauty and importance of yeast.

Michael T. Regan GOOD LIBATIONS: General Lafayette Inn brewmaster Chris Leonard holds court at WinterFest, which attracted craft brewers from throughout the region. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Beer Week figures to give Philadelphians — brewers, bar owners, restaurateurs and, of course, drinkers — an opportunity to tout their town's beer cred. In fact, organizers even expect Beer Week to attract tourists — aficionados who will actually come here just to drink our beer.

The reason is simple, according to experts: Philly, for all of its faults, is a damn fine town to have a pint.

"Philly Beer Week is unequaled by anything in the entire country, ever," says Stan Hieronymus, a New Mexico-based beer writer, blogger (appellationbeer.com) and author of brewing tome Brew Like a Monk (Brewers Publications). "The number of events, the diversity of events — there's nothing like it. And that reflects Philadelphia's status. You've got brewers coming in from everywhere, and obviously that's an indication that Philly is important for beer."

Important, for sure.

But the best? It's certainly subject of some debate.

San Francisco and Portland, Ore., have fine brew cultures of their own, the latter boasting probably the strongest collection of local breweries in the country. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute, Oregon ranked fifth in the nation in 2007 with 93 breweries, with Pennsylvania coming in seventh with 81. San Francisco has a craft-beer history dating back to Fritz Maytag and his pioneering work with Anchor Brewing Co. in the 1960s.

Then there's the brewpub issue. For a city of its size, Philadelphia has a surprisingly small number of them (four, with Dock Street Brewery & Restaurant, Manayunk Brewery and Restaurant, Triumph Brewing Co. and Nodding Head Brewery and Restaurant), especially compared to tiny Portland (more than 20).

"I'd love to see more brewpubs," says Lew Bryson, a Bucks County-based beer writer, author of Pennsylvania Breweries (Stackpole Books) and occasional City Paper contributor. "There's always little rumors here and there and then nothing ever happens. ... There are little brewpubs opening up all over the state — in Berwick, Millheim, Conestoga — and these places are filling in holes on the map. But there's still this big city map with a bunch of holes in it. I don't understand why we can't do brewpubs."

"Realistically," adds Tom Kehoe, founder and brewer of Philadelphia's Yards Brewing Co., "we don't have enough brewpubs."

So Philly isn't quite beer heaven yet.

Michael T. Regan PALM PILOT: Bill Covaleski, founder of Downingtown's Victory Brewing Co., has his hands full of hops, a coveted commodity for any brewer. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

But here's the thing. Even those who say Philly isn't the best beer-drinking city in America — Hieronymus praises Philly but gives the nod to Portland, "just because of the sheer number of local breweries," while Toronto-based beer writer Stephen Beaumont ranks Philly with Portland and San Francisco but refuses to name one the best — think the city is nonetheless a beer mecca, one of the top three in the country and among the very best in the world.

The main reason, they say, is this: Nowhere else in America can a beer drinker find quite what they can find so easily in Philadelphia.

Specifically, variety. Belgians. Germans. Beers from everywhere else, too. Acclaimed craft breweries and a stalwart survivor like Yuengling. And bars and restaurants that serve all of these beers almost by default. Take, for example, the impressive selection offered at Center City's Jose Pistola's, where drinkers can sample St. Bernardus 12 (Belgium), Jever Pilsener (Germany) and Avery New World Porter (Colorado), among others, on tap and everything from De Dolle Oerbier (Belgium) to Weihenstephaner Korbinian (Germany) to Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA (Delaware) in bottles.

Jose Pistola's is a Mexican restaurant.

"In terms of diversity of beer," says Hieronymus, "there is no place more diverse than Philadelphia."

That's not likely to change, either.

In fact, according to beer experts both local and national (and even in the midst of a sluggish economy and soaring hop prices, which are up, by some estimates, 400 percent from last year), the beer scene that Philly boasts today — one built on an acclaimed collection of regional and craft breweries stretching from Delaware to Easton, a robust pub culture that vigorously supports local brews, adventurous restaurateurs willing to serve a variety of international beers and an enthusiastic populace that loves and understands beer — is only getting stronger. That's because more Philadelphians than ever seem to be turning away from the staid old world of BudMillerCoors and reaching for something different.

Some evidence of this can be found in the success of the Delaware Valley's many craft breweries, several of which are enjoying steady, impressive growth — and eyeing even more.

Yards, which served its first beer in 1995 and produces the popular ESA and Philadelphia Pale Ale, is building a new brewery on Delaware Avenue that founder Kehoe hopes will allow him reach out to new markets. Up I-95 in Kensington, Kehoe's former partners Bill and Nancy Barton recently launched Philadelphia Brewing Co., meaning there are now two production breweries within city limits.

Bill Covaleski's Victory, makers of Hop Devil, is now pumping out 38,000 barrels a year. (One barrel equals 31 gallons; by contrast, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. ships more than a half-million barrels a year.) It recently began a massive renovation of its on-site restaurant and brewpub, which is so popular that waits for a table often stretch out more than an hour.

Phoenixville's Sly Fox, which has won kudos for both the quality of its beers and its innovative use of cans for packaging, reported 30 percent growth last year. Beers made by Delaware's pioneering Dogfish Head, South Jersey's Flying Fish, Adamstown's Stoudt's, Easton's Weyerbacher and Harrisburg's Tröegs are commonly found on local taps, too.

Then there are those numbers being floated by the folks behind Philly Beer Week. They say that nearly every craft brewery in the Philly region saw double-digit growth in 2007, and that, according to data compiled by the Beer Institute and the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the local beer industry is now big enough to employ 16,000 workers and generate $422 million in wages and $122 million in taxes each year.

They also claim that Philadelphia — scrappy, blue-collar Philadelphia — drinks more fine Belgian ale (reputed for its history, potency and adventurous flavors) than the Belgian capital of Brussels.

"Without a doubt, this is the best beer city in the country, and I could make a case that it's the best beer city in the world," says Peters. "Philadelphia doesn't have that brewing culture that you'd find in Cologne or Munich, but ... we have incredible local breweries."

The sheer variety of available beer — the thing, more than anything else, that separates Philly from other beer cities — has its roots in one man's trip to Belgium, more than 20 years ago.

That man was Peters.

His experience in Belgium was so eye-opening that he returned to Philadelphia with the singular goal of introducing his city to real beer. He pulled it off, too, first with beer dinners at Copa, Too! and, later, with his acclaimed Monk's Café.

"I think I was the first one to say it, years ago: Philadelphia is Brussels on the Schuylkill," says Beaumont, author of Premium Beer Drinker's Guide (Firefly Books). "It's got the best Belgian scene anywhere but Brussels. And really, a lot of the Belgian beer we have today in the United States is here because of the pioneers in the Philly area that really pushed things — Tom Peters, [distributor] Eddie Friedland."

Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"I always hear about Portland and all of these brewpubs," adds Don Russell, who writes the "Joe Sixpack" column for the Daily News. "And, yeah, it's a great beer town. They have a great scene there. But they don't have what Philly has — they have nowhere near the kind of import scene that Philly has. We've got six Belgian beer bars in town now, and we're drinking beers here in Philadelphia [when] there's only one other place you can drink them: Belgium."

Peters may have planned on simply introducing his fellow citizens to Belgian beer, but what he actually did was open their minds to good beer.

That's because at the same time he was importing the joys of dubbels, local brewers were making their push to grab the market back from the megabrewers. Pottsville's Yuengling had by then penetrated deep into the Philly market, proving that a darker lager could compete with the fizzy yellow stuff, and the first wave of local craft breweries were just opening their doors. And while a few of them eventually shut down — Independence and Red Bell were the highest-profile failures — the true brewing believers, including Flying Fish, Yards, Victory and Dogfish Head, survived and thrived.

"What's innovative about our local breweries is that they do interpretations of other beers," says Peters. "And I think a lot of that does stem back to the Belgian idea of, 'Don't file beer under such a narrow definition.'"

Yards' Kehoe, whose most popular beers are far from Belgian-style, agrees.

"When we started out, there were already a few good beer bars — places that were starting to concentrate on putting good beers on tap from around the U.S. and imports, too," Kehoe says. "That's one of the things that helped the microbrews come into their own. Philly was already doing a lot of European beers, German beers, wheat beers. Just even by having a wheat beer, people were able to discover that beer didn't have to be crystal clear. Those beer bars were setting the tone for us craft brewers to come up, so we could say, 'If you like those beers, well, we can make good beer here in the U.S., too. It's going to be fresh, and alive, and from right here in Philly.'"

Maybe the most remarkable thing is that Philadelphians bought into it, and have kept buying it ever since. In fact, Russell says in his forthcoming book, Joe Sixpack's Philly Beer Guide: A Reporter's Notes on the Best Beer-Drinking City in America (Camino Books), that Philadelphia and its suburbs are now home to more than 400 bars and restaurants that offer impressive beer selections. Take a trip to Denver, he says, and you might find 20.

Ask General Lafayette's Leonard, though, and he'll tell you that Philly's beer scene is far from tapped out. More growth, he says, is possible.

Which is why he's moving forward on plans to take tiny General Lafayette into the big-time. Relatively speaking, of course.

"We're about as small of a brewery as you can get," says Leonard, who has cultivated a loyal customer base by creating such brews as his Chocolate Thunder Porter and the General Lafayette Biere de Framboises. "We've got seven barrels, five fermenters and eight tanks. We were just talking about this today — 'How much can we push it here without adding tanks?' We produce about 500 barrels a year, and I think if we were really cranking, we could probably get up to 800 or 900. That's a goal for us. But [we] are looking at bottling some of our beer, and if that goes well ... we may have to have a new plan. I honestly think the market for our product is still a little bit untapped."

If true, that speaks volumes to the area's appetite for locally produced beer. But in a sense, says Leonard, that's nothing new: Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, have a long tradition of supporting area brews.

And he's not alone in believing that tradition will live on, possible stronger than ever.

"I don't see any reasons," Leonard says, "why this thing couldn't continue."

(editorial@citypaper.net)