This Is My Blood: Homestead / Pig Iron Porter / Philly Phavorite

Let's talk about Iron Hill Brewery, and let's be charitable—this chain of brewpubs has not insulted me in any personal way, and to talk unnecessary shit on it more exposes me as an asshole than anything else. Anything negative I could say in this space is just another manifestation of my deep-seeded and fucked up need to hold everything "suburban" at arm's length, as if a business that wants to focus on quiet areas outside the city are "less authentic" for some reason. I have a tendency to sneer at anything outside the city limits, but have been able to cloak this needless bitterness for years because my journeys to the suburbs were few and far between. Now we live two minutes away from the Philly/Montco border, and I'm forced to face my very real demons.

So, Iron Hill Brewery. There are 20 locations scattered mostly around the SE Pennsylvania area. I was familiar with the chain before a Huntingdon Valley location opened in 2016 (HV is west of Rockledge, and this Iron Hill might as well be in Rockledge, save for the fact that Rockledge is like 0.0006 square miles). So I've been there more than a handful of times, and I've never had a bad experience there. Notably, we tacked it on to the beginning of the Pike Hike in late 2016, and that same year, Pam threw me a birthday gathering for my 28th. Good times.

So why am I so reluctant to praise this place? I gotta assume it has to do with this picture I've tried to paint of myself, for some reason, over the past however many years. I've tried to portray myself as a "city boy." I truly appreciated Port Richmond in all its gritty glory. I feel connected to my city on early Sunday mornings driving through battered neighborhoods all around Philly. I make these feelings known because that's how I want to see myself. I've fallen into this thought process that equates everything in the city to be cool and everything outside the city to be milquetoast and boring, and everything that is outside the city but tries to be like the city to be inauthentic, the worst of all sins.

Which is stupid. It's stupid even if you ignore the leaps of logic it requires to denigrate the Iron Hill location in Center City Philadelphia ("Oh, that location is just for suburban folk who take Regional Rail into the city on Saturday afternoons"). It's stupid because city boundaries are subjective and man-made and mean nothing when it comes to beer. It's stupid because it makes me seem incredibly vain, worried about how I'm portrayed to the outside world when the outside world could literally not give less of a fuck.

And it's stupid because I spent my formative years in the suburbs. Really, the more I think about it, I think this wild generalization about the suburbs being some Arcade Fire-inspired monochrome hellscape of vapidity is just a frantic pushback against the experience of a childhood that was incredibly normal. Afraid that I will be stuck in the mire of sameness, I've resorted to pretending to be someone that I'm not. At the end of the day, I'm just another fucking dude from some fucking suburban town. That makes me uncomfortable. It always will. And like it or not, the idea of "suburbs" has become a sort of scapegoat in my futile quest to be someone that I'm not.

It's time to just accept my place in the universe: given a couple hours of free time while the kids are chilling with their grandparents on a Saturday evening, Pam and I went to Iron Hill Brewery in the suburbs.

I mean, I don't even feel comfortable discussing the beers all that much after what I just wrote. My opinion is that Iron Hill's beers are not really all that notable, "generic" at worst and "pretty decent!" at best. I've never had a beer from Iron Hill's taps and been blown away. They aren't doing anything exciting or meaningful in the arena of brewing beer. This is my opinion. But is it my honest opinion, or am I fronting again? Equating the beer with the experience, and disparaging the product only because the peddlers of that product don't seem "authentic" to this exposed phony? I don't know.

I honestly don't! I don't know what else to tell you. It's just something I'm going to have to work through, as the years go by, and I become acquainted with the quiet life out here in no man's land. That assimilation starts with the local brewery, and it continues through the King of the Hill Reward Club, where I admit that if I cannot beat them, then I might as well join them, and get an extra 6 oz. per beer to celebrate the defeat of the Joe I once knew.

 

NOTES (Beer #1)

BEER: Homestead

STYLE: Belgian Saison (Farmhouse Ale)

ABV: 4.6%

BREWED BY: Iron Hill Brewery

LOCATION: Each beer is made in-house, so the location for this beer I had was Huntingdon Valley, PA

PURCHASED AT: the brewery

PAIRED WITH: no kids

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5 (kinda lifeless for a Belgian)

 

 

NOTES (Beer #2)

BEER: Pig Iron Porter

STYLE: Porter

ABV: 5.4%

BREWED BY: Iron Hill Brewery

LOCATION: Huntingdon Valley, PA, but you can get all three of these beers at any location, and they'll taste mostly the same

PURCHASED AT: the brewery, in their beer garden

PAIRED WITH: cheesesteak eggrolls (alright, these are good enough that I don't mind going to the suburbs for them)

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5 (nice and roasty as the night got a little chillier)

 

NOTES (Beer #3)

BEER: Philly Phavorite

STYLE: Hazy IPA

ABV: 6.7%

BREWED BY: Iron Hill Brewery

LOCATION: ya know

PURCHASED AT: on location

PAIRED WITH: Figgy Piggy Grilled Cheese (even the waiter agreed that this is an embarrassing name for a sandwich)

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5 (disappointed that this ended up being hazier than I had hoped, but still, it was pretty good)

 

BEER COUNT: 470.5 (woke up saying "alright if I have a half a beer today I'll be back on par" and then I drank three)