Pump action: The time for pretending that wine is as subtle or as sophisticated as beer is over.

What Ales Ye?

Forget wine—Philly is an amazing beer city.

by Kirsten Henri

If life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, right? We’re a city chock-full of lemons—whether it’s rampant political corruption, the high murder rate or stupidly high local taxes—and each sour offering invites us to pucker up and become just as acidic and bitter ourselves. But so far no one’s managed to turn these lemons into anything other than what they are: rotten fruit.

With one exception. The lemon is our ridiculous liquor licensing laws. The lemonade is the BYOB.

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation markets the BYOB phenomenon as something awesome. It produced a promotional booklet about it that resulted in a feature in The Washington Post.

But out-of-town visitors don’t know the bum half of the BYOB deal—you have to go to a store run by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) to buy your wine. (Yes, many locals go to Jersey to buy wine, but you can’t tell tourists that, can you?)

For all the good that came from the stewardship of former chairman Jonathan Newman (the darling of the cork-dork set for both his Chairman’s Select program and his redesign of state stores), the PLCB remains a state monopoly that, based on my experiences buying wine, doesn’t make customer service or salesmanship a priority.

The worst thing about this monopoly isn’t the lack of competition or the bureaucracy (although both are lousy). The worst part is customer service. Sure you can buy a halfway decent wine now, but can you get anyone at the store to point you toward it? State store employees don’t work there out of a deep, abiding love for wine and spirits or hospitality; they work there because it’s a job.

The PLCB isn’t going anywhere, and with the recent dust-up over Gov. Rendell’s appointment of $150,000-a-year CEO Joe Conti to serve above Newman, it doesn’t seem like the politicking is going anywhere either.

I’m going to suggest something radical. Let’s stop trying to work around the state store system. Let’s turn our backs on the whole mess. Let’s stop turning lemons into wishy-washy lemonade.

Let’s embrace local craft beer instead.

There’s no need to spin this excellent local product. Craft beer offers sophistication without pomposity and has just as many (if not more) complex flavor profiles and textures as wine.

You want great customer service? Head to a beer store like the Foodery, and employees like Jeff Slick will expertly guide you using actual beer knowledge and a genuine love of the product. And if you just want something quick, you can buy beer at your local deli with little fanfare. The point is you have the choice.

Most bars here have local beer to offer—maybe it’s just Yuengling Lager, but often you’ll find excellent selections from Yards, Stoudt’s, Sly Fox, Victory, Lancaster and Troegs. Beer is a big part of our local history. Before Prohibition, Philadelphia was a tremendous beer town with a slew of breweries, many operated by German immigrants. In fact, the first American lager was brewed here in 1840. We’re a beer burg—not a wine town.

With multiple beer-oriented Philadelphia restaurants and bars opening or scheduled to open over the next year, it’s safe to say craft beer-loving is as much a genuine Philly trend as the much more widely trumpeted BYOB.

There’s room for both beer and wine in any food lover’s gullet, but in Philadelphia the universe conspires against us becoming a world-class wine town. So why don’t we fulfill our destiny, reclaim our crown and once again become the greatest beer city in America?