So, here’s the basic round-up: Philly is a beer town. This is not new news, but it is unbelievable the array of beer available there. We’re not talking in the way like Portland, Ore. is influential with all its breweries, we’re saying the Philly folks just like to have good beer around, from all over the place. Sure, there’s no ABV cap in Pennsylvania, making some interesting beers show-up in stores like The Foodery, but outside of that beer-geek-ness, you can barely go anywhere without finding at least one good beer on a menu. And by good, we don’t mean decent—we mean good.

We were stood-up at Victory Brewing. Well, maybe. We also hit horrendous traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway, which if you’ve never driven on, it is hard to translate the amount of anxiety the road produces. We don’t know if we misunderstood our time, but we did not get the full tour, which was disappointing. However, the Victory Brewpub is a great stop. Yummy food—how about some Hop Devil Potato Soup? We had crazy delicious burgers along with glasses of both Hop Devil and Storm King on cask. (Incidentally, The New York Times says today that cask beer is coming back.) Too bad two weeks early for the Hop Wallop release.

The best thing we found at Victory was in the package store, where we bought a t-shirt that has B-E-E-R spelled out in the formation of Philadelphia’s famous LOVE sculpture, by Robert Indiana. We heart that shirt already.