Herman's Coffee

Herman's Coffee is a roastery, café and specialty market in Pennsport, opened by Mat Falco in 2017 inside a former auto-mechanic's shop. Its significance to anyone not drinking is a matter of scale: beginning in 2020, after Falco discovered the non-alcoholic aperitif Ghia, he built what the Philadelphia Inquirer describes as one of the region's largest zero-proof selections — over two hundred non-alcoholic wines, spirits and beers, fifty to seventy-five mixers and syrups, and more than a hundred bitters, most of it available to take home.

That bitters count is the striking number. More than a hundred varieties is a serious collection by any bar's standard, and bitters are the component that most often quietly disqualifies a drink for someone avoiding alcohol entirely, since the conventional product is 35–45% ABV. A shop stocking non-alcoholic bitters at that depth is solving a problem most people do not know they have until they read a label.

By day the café pours its own house-made non-alcoholic creations — the Blood Orange Espresso Tonic among them, which is the espresso-and-tonic combination that sounds implausible and works: the quinine bitterness and carbonation lift the coffee's acidity into something startlingly refreshing. A Lavender Lemonade Spritz sits at the softer end.

The combination of café, roastery and market is what makes it useful in practice. Someone new to not drinking can taste something on site, ask what it is, and then buy a bottle of it to have at home — which is the gap between curiosity and actually changing what you drink. Very few venues close that loop.

The hours are generous and slightly irregular: six in the morning to eleven at night on Monday, Thursday and Friday, six to six on Tuesday and Wednesday, and seven to eleven at weekends. Note the early Tuesday and Wednesday close before planning an evening.