City Tap House

I'm all for giving the undereducated, over-Budweisered campus crowd a chance to learn their Tucher from their tuchus. But what happens to the fizz of the city's hippest trend when craft beer goes college-town corporate?

The massive new 300-seat City Tap House is a fascinating test case. The typical Philly beer-bar grunge has been thoroughly supplanted here by a soaring Mission wood space outfitted with salvaged planks and hammered copper. Fire pits blaze at night on the expansive "green roof" terrace of the second-floor balcony at University City's mod new Radian building, where well-scrubbed Ivy Leaguers network around tasting racks of wheat beer and thin-crusted pizzas beneath moonlit high-rise dorms. Inside, meanwhile, taps with 60 craft beers line the 20-yard-long copper bar, gushing forth in the widest array of quality drafts the city has yet to sip.

All in all, it is a grandly polished showplace for the region's darling drink. It also promises an image upgrade for Public House Investments, a locally based group whose mega-bars and happy-hour havens (Field House, Public House, and Mission Grill) are best known for drink specials and a TV-screen blitz that even partner Gary Cardi concedes is "a little obnoxious."

But doing craft beer right involves more than simply putting some Arrogant Bastard on tap for $6 a goblet. To begin with, it helps to clean the glasses. My first glass on a Friday night still reeked of dish soap. The second came tattooed with lipstick ("Not yours?" winked the bartendress with an obviously well-practiced touché). Then came a glass with bread crumbs floating on top, though by this time I was almost willing to sip around the debris because the alternative - City Tap's skunky tap water - tasted like it was filtered through a goldfish bowl.

If you want good advice on what to drink, good luck if "beer steward" and manager Andy Farrell is otherwise occupied. Only one of my three servers (charming Lindsay) was more than clueless in guiding us through the big international list. One pleaded finals fatigue for his ignorance. Another needed us to tell him that Victory's Scarlet Fire is a smoked beer.

The scattered service, in general, needs polish. That was obvious when we spied a mouse scurrying between the tables beside us on the terrace, darting in and out of the scruffy brown patch of burned-out vegetation known as a "green roof."