HATBORO, PENNSYLVANIA
Located inside a former auto body shop (attached to a Goodyear repair center) and utilizing rock-related beer names, ARTIFACT BREWING opened its doors October 18, 2019. Just up the road from the center of town in the bucolic north Philly suburb of Hatboro (established in Colonial times by an English hatter), this rustic cement-floored pub features the works of local craft beer artisans Brian Mc Kinney and Matt Brzowski. Set up as a three-barrel nano brewery with four serving tanks and twelve-plus tap handles, Artifact became the borough’s second operating brewery (behind Crooked Eye).
A green-walled cement floored space with a 14-seat, plank-sided, maple- topped bar, Artifact’s small interior includes four community tables, three round cocktail tables and a wooden bar-walled American flag.
My wife and I head up to the bar and consume six well-rounded brews on our pre-Halloween ’19 journey.
For their maiden voyage, Artifact created interestingly enigmatic pale ale, Paradigm Shift, a stylistically advanced dry body utilized citric-spiced Norwegian Kviek yeast to temper its beet-sugared maple syruping, complacent orange tartness and mild cherry coughdrop smidge.
Candi-sugared orange peel sweetness rode above spiced banana, vanilla and caramel illusions for delightful As Serious Can Be, a lightly creamed moderate-medium body perfect for Belgian ale lovers.
On the surface, floral-cologned juniper bittering picked up zesty lemon juicing for pleasantly offbeat saison, Forever Sleeping, leaving ginger-herbed rose hips, elderflower and chamomile undertones in its busy turpentine-lacquered kiwi-guava-induced Nelson hop wake.
Combining dankly herbal lemon-dried Golding hops with oats-backed German pilsner malts let hybridized English bitter-styled kolsch, Everyman, remain smoothly dry and crisply clean.
Dewy tobacco-sweet mossing inundated grapefruit, pineapple and orange rind dryness for subtly designed English bitter, Walk Like A Smile.
Before heading out on this sunny Saturday in October, quaffed today’s only IPA (also note, there were no dark beers available).
Tropical fruit-spiced Galaxy and Vic Secret hops sharpened herbal-perfumed medium body, Contagious Smile IPA, a cucumber-watered refresher with tangy grapefruit, pineapple and orange piquancy gaining blissful lemon zesting.
www.artifactales.com/