KUTZTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
North of Philadelphia lies steel town, Bethlehem, and twenty miles southwest, tiny metropolis, Kutztown, visited December ’05. Located in East Penn Valley between the Blue and South Mountains, Kutztown’s manufacturing community sidles agrarian farmland.
Home of Golden Avalanche Brewing Company in a suburban warehouse district, Main Street’s KUTZTOWN TAVERN proudly serves its small community with distinct brews and light American cuisine (seafood, soup-salad, sandwiches, pasta, pretzel pizzas). Pale-wheat-pilsner malt sacks near front door, silver and copper kettles surrounding rightward bar, tucked-in pine booths and upstairs banquet hall consume cozy lodge-like clear-oak lounge. Stonewalled cement-floored limestone-sided basement hangout, Shorty’s Bar, features capacious 50-foot bar, three billiards tables, and local bands.
Gentler tastes will appreciate mild-grained grapefruit-trimmed popcorn-like Blonde Lager, orange-fruited oats-honeyed bohemian golden Young Allen’s Lager, dry banana-greened clove-dashed lemon-wedged seltzer-fizzed Donner Weiss, and mellow yellow-fruited dry-hopped wheat-backed subtlety Avalanche Light Lager.
Bolder quaffs will admire floral-hopped fruit-spiced malt-smoked Olde Brick Alt (Brown Ale), Band-Aid-tongued salami-seared wood-burnt Tavern Smoked Beer, and rich vanilla-chocolate-coffee-bolstered Onyx Cream Stout. Medium thirsts are directed to off-dry tea-like rye-breaded 80 Schilling Milling.
During September 2012, old pal Karl Knief visited Kutztown Tavern and came back with reliable Blueberry Lager. Its bittersweet blueberry tartness lingered over a soap-stoned white wheat base as lemony hop-fizzed crisping speckled the perfume-lacquered blueberry essence.