“Drink Joe’s Beer”. The Man Behind the Beer.

“Drink Joe’s Beer”. The Man Behind the Beer.

I am a Philly gal of a “certain age”, and a Northeast Philly gal at that. Despite being transplanted in to Delco for the past 20 years, my nostalgic view of my beloved city of Philadelphia dates back over 50 years. Okay, I guess I just gave my age away. So if you are from Philadelphia, and are around 50, 60 , 70 or 80 ish, you may recall that at one time the name Ortlieb meant something. And if it doesn’t than you must not be a beer drinker or paid much attention to your hometown businesses.

Last month, my husband Chris and I had an opportunity to sit and have dinner with Joe Ortlieb himself, his wife Maralyn as well as his son Trupert. You see, my husband Chris Linton is a brewery builder (Conshohocken Brewing Co, Tired Hands, LaCabra, etc and coming soon Love City) and well Ortlieb’s was one of the largest brewing companies in Philadelphia since after the Civil War. So when a fortuitous dinner meeting with former Ortlieb’s “Joe’s Beer” was “brewing” we “hopped” on the invite. (Puns definitely intended)

Historically speaking, the Ortlieb family began brewing it’s label at it’s 3rd street Philadelphia location in what is now considered Northern Liberties as early as the 1880’s when Trupert Ortlieb, a Civil War veteran, purchased a brewery which in turn became quite active up until Prohibition era and continued to remain a lucrative family business for many, many years with their hey-days right after WWII when they had reached brewing capacity of up to 500,000 barrels a year. As the times “they were a changing” so was the dynamics of the brewing business. So in 1975, 3rd generation Joseph Ortlieb, then age 42, took over the family business, a business he knew quite well since he was a youngster and began promoting Ortlieb as a local beer rather than a regional beer. Which meant if you lived west of Pittsburg, you probably never heard of Ortliebs.

Over the course of dinner, I must say that the conversation flowed quite easily. So while we were sitting across from Joe and his wife of 65 years, at LaCabra Brewery in Berwyn, it occurred to me what made “Joe’s Beer” special and nostalgic to me. It was Joe himself. Despite our age differences of over 35 odd years, I felt like I was talking to an old friend. Possibly because he brought me back to my youth. My father would have just turned 90 this year, and there was nothing that my dad liked better than an ice cold beer, especially on a hot summer day. My father drank Ortlieb’s as did most of the adults I knew back then. And grabbin’ a “quart of Ort” was what the younger crowd would say, if they were going to go out for a beer. It was just something you saw advertised on billboards or what you saw in the fridge next to the orange juice. It might possibly be the first beer I tasted, at age 21, of course.

As we chatted over a beer(s), my husband Chris, Trupert and I with an IPA (India Pale Ale) and Joe sticking with the closest thing to a pilsner, Joe revealed his outlook over the current brewery scene which was one of positivity. He never seemed to regret the difficult decision to close up shop as the beer industry grew, because he knew the times did change. The fancy hamburger he and his wife had sitting in front of themselves, may have been a bit over the top for his familiar palate, but nonetheless praised the efforts of all those coming up the ranks behind innovators of the beer business like himself. He seemed quite optimistic over the boom of the craft brewery industry, because he remembered that in a sense, Ortlieb was its own craft beer. Its own flavor at the time. He mentioned that the one thing that the newer breweries have in common with his own vision was keeping it local. In this day and age of the vastness of choices of good beer, marketing closer to home may be the way to go. Sure it’s nice to have a well-known label across the country, but as us Philly people know, we pride ourselves in being the big, small-town. And local means fresh and native to our hometown, just like soft pretzels, “wooder-ice’ and cheesesteaks.

As the late afternoon conversation came to an end, we took a collective photo. I stood next to Joe’s wife Maralyn, I said, “you married a beer guy and I married one too”. She said, well, it’s been a whole lot of fun over the years.” I agreed.

The legacy behind the Ortlieb family, its success and Joe’s Beer is easily found on the internet. But the opportunity to sit down and have a beer with Joe, his wife and son was priceless. Thanks Joe.