Multi-tap experiment in Philly

Drew Lazor has the dope on City Tap House over at Meal Ticket. This huge new project (3925 Walnut, in the Radian in University City, so older farts beware: this place comes with a built-in college crowd) is running 72 taps, with about a dozen of them doubled macro stuff. The others are craft-dedicated, and broken down like this, according to beer operations guy Andy Farrell (late of Bridgid's):

Farrell is looking at things “from a local level, a regional level and a global level,” he says. About 60 percent of those taps will be dedicated to good-any-time-of-year craft beers — Dogfish 60-Minute IPA is one time-tested example Farrell gives, but also expect American craft and Belgian-and-otherwise standbys — while the remaining 40 percent be used to pour one-off specialty beers, harder-to-find regional selections, offerings from new breweries and so forth. They’ll definitely look local first, though, with attention paid to seasonality. “With the amount of great crafts we have locally, there’s plenty of room for representation for that,” says Farrell. “From both the beverage and kitchen perspective, [we are mindful of] the ‘buy fresh, buy local’ movement.”

And if "standybs" isn't damning with faint praise, I don't know what is. Still...copious beer lists, careful beer care, and private taps in a private dining room all sounds good, and it's great to see more good beer in University City (almost as good as seeing more good beer in the Northeast: thanks for buying the Blue Ox, Scoats!). The food sounds awesome, too. The space looks gorgeous.

Waiting for the "but"? Here it is: but there are little alarm bells going off in my head. I've seen too many overly-tapped places fail in Philly. There is a tradition in this town of keeping the taps in a lower range; possibly related to our one happy liquor-law-legacy, the requirement that taps be cleaned once a week, and that cleaning be logged. Cleaning taps is costly, in labor and in lost beer, and the more taps you have, the more it costs.

Or maybe it's care for freshness. The long-decamped-but-never-forgotten Jim Anderson used a memorable term for the balance between less selection and more freshness: "Small and firm" vs. "big and floppy." I've been in places where there were lots of taps, and they kept them all flowing fast enough to keep them reasonably fresh: Portland, Maine's Great Lost Bear comes to mind, or Max's on Broadway (recently mentioned below) in Baltimore. You have to be scrupulous about cleanliness, you have to cultivate the right crowd, and you have to move the beer when it's been on too long.

Start right up with 60 taps, smack-dab in the middle of a ton of college students? Maybe. Local 44's doing well, though they have fewer taps (and a lot fewer bottles) and they aimed right at the non-student population from the get-go.

Look, I hope this works. Really, I'd be fascinated to see what's going to happen when a multi-multi-tap place succeeds in Philly, because it may boost this already draft-mad city to a whole new level. But Mad Mex already has a ton of taps in U-City, and they're not setting the city's beer scene on fire.

Can you set a high-end beer bar down in the middle of college bar central and make it work without making it sloppy? Maybe, and clearly the Radian is working at keeping the bar high (so to speak). Iron Hill Lancaster is kicking ass right across the street from my dear old alma mammy. It looks like the folks behind City Tap House have the money to stay the course long enough to give it a fair chance. Best of luck; hope to stop in soon (and at Kraftwork and Munk & Nunn and Bruce Nichols' new Headhouse (not quite open yet)...so many bars! What a wonderful pain, to feel the longing to visit them all.)


One somewhat-related sad note: Tara Nurin notes the closing of Ortlieb's Jazzhaus...and now I'll never get to go. So many missed opportunities in this life; must stop going to the same places all the time.

Iron City Brewing moving to Latrobe

Just heard that Iron City Brewing is going to be moving brewing operations to City Brewing's plant in Latrobe, the former Rolling Rock brewery. Canning ops had already moved to High Falls -- er, Genesee, in Rochester (it's so tough to keep up with these name changes), and now it appears all other brewing will be done at Latrobe.

What's all that mean? Well, for the beer itself, not much. That's a good brewery, good staff, they'll make IC taste like IC.

Outside the beer in the bottle, it gets a lot more ... complicated. For one thing, job losses: Latrobe is much more efficient and automated (which will, of course, make brewing and producing beer more efficient and cheaper, and probably more consistent, though the Lawrenceville plant does pretty well on that). For another, money: Iron City owes Pittsburgh a lot of it, still, and most of the debt structure depended on Iron City staying in their Lawrenceville plant. Are they going to skip town? (Probably not, because they're keeping their headquarters in Lawrenceville, but that's going to leave them with a ton of debt.)

But the big deal is...what the hell's Iron City when it's not made in Pittsburgh? It's not your hometown beer any more, is it? A reporter just asked me how I thought things would go for Iron City, and I asked him in return, have you seen much Stoney's lately? Deracinated (consider it a free Word-of-the-Day) beers just don't do well; Rolling Rock's another example that's too close to miss.

I'm not optimistic about this. Iron City's current management has not proved up to the admittedly big job of stopping the brand's slide. I don't know how they're going to convince people that they should buy Iron City again because now it's not made in the Iron City. A bigger job. At this point, it looks like they're planning to Kalmanovitz the brand into the graveyard.

The Pabst Miracle may be their only hope: any bicycle messengers need a new cheap beer?