Brewery

Is there a more soul-satisfying combination in the edible universe than handmade pizza and beer? I don't think so. And it's a good thing, considering that pizza and beer are pretty much the main attractions on the menu at Mount Airy's funky new Earth Bread + Brewery. Actually, there are also a fresh salad or two, a creamy soup of the day, some mixed olives, and a cheese platter. There is also a surprisingly smart selection of international wines by the glass. But brews and "breads" clearly rule the yeasty ambitions of this welcome new addition to Germantown Avenue, where an igloo-shaped oven in the front blazes ash logs at 700 degrees, and a petite set of brew tanks tucked into the back pumps out some eccentric beers worth driving for. It's a willingness to focus on doing these two things well (even if there's yet some work to do)

Bruce Graham tries something a little different in each successive play that he writes. "Burkie" was his blue-collar comedy and "Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar and Grill" his end-of-the-world comedy. In "Minor Demons" he tackled straight drama and experimented with a Greek chorus. For "Moon Over the Brewery," which last night opened a world-premiere engagement at the Annenberg Center's Harold Prince Theatre, he is back in blue-collar land and his chosen form is comedy-fantasy, yet again under the auspices of the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays.

Attorneys for Philadelphia beer baron William H. Pflaumer yesterday asked a federal judge to let Pflaumer out of prison early and place him under "electronically supervised house arrest" inside Schmidt's brewery. This way, Pflaumer could help his ailing brewery survive, receive treatment for a life-threatening heart condition and pay his debt to society by donating time to community service, the lawyers told U.S. District Judge Charles Weiner. Under the proposed house arrest, Pflaumer could work at the brewery in the morning, perform community service from noon to 8 p.m., five days a week, and spend nights and weekends at his "residence within the brewery," the lawyers suggested.

William H. Pflaumer, owner of Christian Schmidt Brewing Co. of Philadelphia, has been granted a furlough from a federal penitentiary in Kentucky in order to return here and negotiate the sale of the city's last independent brewery, reliable sources said yesterday. The sources said Pflaumer is due to return tonight to the Lexington, Ky., prison where he is serving the final two years of a three-year sentence for federal tax evasion. He was convicted in July 1983. Reports of an impending sale of Schmidt have been circulating ever since its controversial owner began to fight the federal charges, which were not related to the company.

William H. Pflaumer, 76, the last of the local beer barons, died of heart failure on Saturday, May 22, at Pennsylvania Hospital. Mr. Pflaumer was a quintessential Philadelphia character widely known as "Billy" or, more grandly, "Billy the Beer King. " The final owner of the brewery that produced Schmidt's - Philadelphia's best-known beer - he was sentenced to federal prison in 1983 for evading more than $125,000 in excise taxes. The Christian Schmidt Brewing Co., between Second and Hancock Streets south of Girard Avenue, was the city's last independent brewery and had been a local institution since 1860.

In 1698, two dozen years before Samuel Adams was born (the patriot, mind you, not the beer label), a mayor in Faversham, Kent, England, set up a brewery over an artesian well. Only last year, the brewery, which later become Shepherd Neame, finally began to export its products to the colonies. Today's beer companies are fond of prattling on and on about all the time it takes to craft a beer. Shepherd Neame, England's longest-operating brewery, could use that excuse to explain why it took nearly three centuries to reach out to Americans.

It's probably always a risky proposition to go out with an ex, especially if you haven't seen him in a while and there are still some unresolved issues floating around. But it's a much safer proposition if there's good beer in plentiful supply, as there is at Nodding Head Brewery. Nodding Head, which opened in January on the site of the former Samuel Adams Brew House, has become a hangout for the 20something set, drawn by brewmeister Brandon Greenwood's "handcrafted" beers. Greenwood, who earned a beer-making degree in Edinburgh, has done time at breweries in Scotland as well as Stroh's in Minnesota and a stint as head brewer at Philadelphia's Yards Brewing Company.

Schmidt's of Philadelphia could soon be Schmidt's of La Crosse. The G. Heileman Brewing Co., of La Crosse, Wis., said in an announcement yesterday that it has signed a letter of intent to buy some of the beer labels of Philadelphia's C. Schmidt & Sons for a price to be determined later. The deal would mean the city would lose its last brewery. Russell G. Cleary, Heileman chairman, said in a statement that the deal includes Schmidt's inventory but does not include the brewery at 2nd Street and Girard Avenue or its New York beer distributorship.

Boston Beer Company Inc., which makes Samuel Adams Boston Lager and other beers, said yesterday that it had agreed to pay $55 million to buy a brewery in Breinigsville, Lehigh County, from Diageo North America. The company said that adding the brewery would increase its annual brewing capacity 1.6 million barrels, and that it could eventually produce 2 million barrels a year, more than doubling Boston Beer's current production. Boston Beer shares closed up $2.26, or 5.5 percent, at $43.32 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange.

You walk the streets of the old neighborhoods and sooner or later you start to hear the sounds of a city's forgotten past. Buried like 300-year-old cobblestones 'neath layers of asphalt, the ghosts are still alive . . . if you know how to listen. In Fairmount, you hear the creaking of a wooden wagon wheel coming down Poplar Street. In Northern Liberties, it's the tapping of a barrel-maker's hammer in the basement of a brick warehouse at 4th and Brown. In Germantown, it's a whistling steam engine that heats a brew kettle.

Selling out the brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev is, in the eyes of craft beer drinkers, the equivalent of ditching Gryffindor for Voldemort and the Death Eaters. So it's no wonder Chicago's homegrown Goose Island has taken the beer-geek heat since its sale to the Bud Who Shall Not Be Named in 2011. The good news: since production of Goose Islands' mass-market brews (like 312 Urban Wheat) have been moved to Colorado and New York for a national rollout, there's more room at the original Chicago brewery for its more interesting efforts.

It's no barroom brawl, but the City of Philadelphia v. D.G. Yuengling & Son Inc. has the makings of an interesting tussle. What's not in dispute is that the city has filed a lawsuit in Common Pleas Court seeking to collect $6.63 million in taxes, interest, and penalties against the Yuengling brewery for not paying the Business Income and Receipts Tax. What's also not in dispute is that the brewery itself is in Pottsville, more than 90...

BUDWEISER - FIZZY, yellow Budweiser - now makes a bourbon-and-vanilla-flavored amber lager. If that's not a sign of the impending apocalypse, I don't know what is. Not to worry. The End is precisely why we drink beer to begin with. Drinking is all about enjoying life. It is hedonistic and intemperate. We drink for the moment, not the future. We drink because we know someday we won't. We drink because, as the polka laureate tells us, in heaven there is no beer. The people who make our beer certainly know this.

RESEARCH AT Joe Sixpack Central is a never-ending occupation. Here are a few of my recent findings. *  Dundee Oktoberfest (Rochester, N.Y.): Dundee Ales & Lagers is one of those margin-dwellers that has been glomming onto the craft beer renaissance for years. Because it is priced cheaply (low $20s per case), it grabs a lot of drinkers who are after something other than BudMillerCoors but don't want to shell out an extra 10. The entire brand is nearly doomed by its flagship, Original Honey Brown , a decidedly dull, thin amber lager with an unfortunate metallic aftertaste.

A meal of "bread and water" sounds like a harsh sentence. Change that to "bread and beer" at Ardmore's Tired Hands - their crusty loaves baked in cast-iron pans with ale yeast - and I'll have fun all night. Jean Brouillet IV's formula for a brewery-cafe is simple, where the local fare is in service of his inventive beers. And that sturdy bread, served with a rich yellow Trickling Springs butter, sea salt, and fennel pollen, is all the sustenance I'd need. As one of the brightest entries in our current micro-brewery boom, Tired Hands beers are worth the spotlight, with numerous interesting variations on hoppy American ales and Belgian-style saisons, my favorites, anchored by funky and bubbly FarmHands.

YOU HEAR ABOUT these collaboration beers by guys from competing breweries, and you can just imagine the unique creative process - the artistic inspiration, the sharing of ideas, the dynamic environment that feeds their invention. But first things first. "Are we measuring in Fahrenheit or Celsius?" Tim Roberts, a longtime area brewer now at Yards Brewing Co., dropped by Iron Hill Brewery's Maple Shade, N.J., brewpub for a collaborative brew with its head brewer, Chris LaPierre.

A 3 1/2-barrel handmade batch of pale ale is simmering just over his shoulder, filling the garage-size brewery with the sweetest aroma known to man, when Tim Hanna, one of four partners in the brand-new Tuckahoe Brewing Co., mentions the unfortunate gorilla in the room: "We're never going to totally get past C oors Light and M iller Lite down here. " "Down here" is the Jersey Shore, land of Snooki and Smirnoff Ice. Down here, "good beer" means it's cold, wet and half-price during happy hour.

OCEAN VIEW, N.J. - Matt McDevitt spent years living the dream of every grown-up Jersey Shore kid: teach high school during the year, work the beach patrol during summer; in his case, the Sacramento beach in Ventnor. But this year, McDevitt and three buddies, two of them also teachers at Mainland Regional High School, will spend summer chasing an even more tantalizing beach dream: presiding over their own brewery, the Tuckahoe Brewing Co., creating recipes inspired by everything from warm summer days (Marshallville Wit)

PHILLY BEER WEEK is about the city's beer scene — its breweries, bars and restaurants, pub-friendly neighborhoods and Belgian cafes. It's a celebration of the city's long beer-drinking history, its unrivaled diversity of beer styles, its festivals and beer dinners. It's a chance to meet your favorite brewer, raise a glass with the mayor or carry the vaunted Hammer of Glory. More than anything, though, Philly Beer Week is about the beer. I'll make a rough guess that more than 2,000 brands of beer will be poured across the city and suburbs starting Friday.

Scott Rudich got a text one November night from his pal Rich DiLiberto, who was in a bar drinking bad beer and listening to a bad cover band. "We should either start a brewery or a band," DiLiberto wrote. Rudich's reply: "Neither of us play instruments. " And so it was that the grains of Round Guys Brewery were set to steep. Of course, that dream would ferment for nearly 31/2 years before these two pharmaceutical workers would finally open the doors to their Lansdale brewery in early March, when Rudich could legitimately pick up the phone and say with a wink: "Hello, I am the yeast whisperer.