Northern Liberties is where it all started, the beer brewing that once made Philadelphia famous; where the first lager yeast was smuggled in from Bavaria in 1840, setting off a chain of events that resulted in lighter, less-bitter lagers trumping the British ales that arrived 160 years before with the wave of English settlers.
In fact, if you rounded the corner at Third, heading east down Poplar, you would quickly encounter two landmarks testifying to that history.
The first was the blue-and-gold state historical marker announcing the game-changing feat of John Wagner, the German brewer who brought that first batch of yeast. (He'd booked passage on a clipper ship, the better to keep it alive.)
It was hard for historians to pinpoint the address of the tiny brewery in the back of his house where he'd turned out eight barrels of beer at a time, relying on a kettle hung over an open hearth. The address was originally St. John Street, now American. And the numbering system was overhauled in 1859.
The second landmark was more cautionary than ground-breaking - the hulking shell of Ortlieb's bottling plant, dark now and hauntingly empty in the night.
For evidence of an even harder fall, one only needed to head a few more blocks north to Girard, where Christian Schmidt and Sons opened a brewery on the eve of the Civil War, saw it grow to the tenth-largest in the country only to collapse under the assault of the mega-brands at the end of the 1980s, just as the craft movement was rediscovering artisan brewing. Its sprawling site is a scraped-raw building lot, now awaiting its second act.
