Other Half Brewing

Other Half Brewing built its reputation in Brooklyn on hazy, aggressively hopped IPAs, and its Philadelphia taproom on Canal Street in Fishtown pours the same range. What earns it a place in this directory is a heading on the live draft list: "NA Beverages", printed alongside the IPAs, lagers and stouts rather than tucked into a footnote.

The anchor is All In, and the important fact about it is that Other Half brews it themselves. Most breweries that offer a non-alcoholic option buy in someone else's — usually Athletic — which is a perfectly good answer but tells you nothing about whether the brewery cares. Brewing your own means committing equipment, tank time and recipe development to it. All In is a hazy IPA under 0.5% ABV, hopped with Citra, Simcoe and Centennial, and the taproom's own description promises peach candy, ripe grapefruit and mango. Those are three of the most-used hops in modern American IPA, and the flavours listed are exactly what you would expect from a full-strength beer in the same style, which is the point the brewery is making.

Alcohol is doing more work in a beer than most drinkers realise — it carries aroma, adds body, and provides the faint sweetness that balances hop bitterness. Removing it and still landing a beer that reads as a hazy IPA is a genuine technical achievement, and it is why a brewery-made non-alcoholic beer usually beats a contract-brewed one.

Alongside the beer, the taproom stocks St. Agrestis's Phony White Negroni and Phony Mezcal Negroni — bottled, alcohol-free, properly bitter aperitifs from a Brooklyn producer, which cover anyone who does not want a beer at all.

The hours make it a real evening venue: four in the afternoon to ten midweek, opening at noon on Friday and eleven at weekends and running to eleven at night. A taproom is a good format for a mixed group, since ordering by the glass at a counter means nobody is buying rounds and nobody is counting.