Decadent barrel-aged winter solstice celebrator emulates Neapolitan ice cream with its sweet vanilla-chocolate combo and passive strawberry whim. Brandied burgundy wining soaks up dark cherry coughdrop boozing and dainty wintry spicing below fudgy chocolate custard pudding skin sugaring.
Herbal tea-like butterfly pea flower and lightly acidic lemon juicing pace purple paled saison, picking up hibiscus, ginger, lavender, blueberry, elderberry and white wine wavers given slight white peppering over acidulated pilsner malts. At finish, candied citrus tartness spreads.
NORTH WALES, PENNSYLVANIA
Inside a grey stucco mechanics workshop near North Wales’ railroad station, veteran family-owned TEN7 BREWING CO. opened October 26, 2018. Head brewer Matt Nitchke crafts a tidily rounded cornucopia of oft-times slightly offbeat beers, learning his art alongside homebrewers Bob Heger and Gerry Viglietti, who’d experimented with back porch extract stovetop brewing (by incorporating five-gallon pots for steeped specialty grains and boiled malt extract).
Teamed up in a glorified cement-floored, overhead-doored garage, Ten 7’s principals set up thier Industrial-styled pub with olden corrugated aluminum walls, lacquered bark bar top, mantled white tile draught handles and two side TV’s. Six canary yellow plastic stools, a few ’60s-era couched and chairs, several wooden community tables and an imposing brewtank staging area fill out the high-ceilinged interior. There’s a Ten7 Brewing insignia hanging from the center of the bar. A back deck provides further seating.
My wife and I traveled to the northern Philly suburbs early May ’26, stopping first at this humble ‘barndominium’ around 3 PM on a Thursday, taking home a half-dozen more beers (reviewed in Beer Index).
Easygoing dry pale ale, Blonde, Jane Blonde, strapped cucumber-watered watermelon rind earthiness to soft white breading in unconventional fashion.
Dry lemony herbal spicing crackled for lightly peppered kolsch, Did We Just Become Best Friends, a briskly crisp moderation.
Treacly hazy India Pale Ale, It’s Always Honey In Philadelphia, combined lemony orange rind bittering, briny mango-guava tartness, peachy clementine sweetness and mild grapefruit swipe with light herbal spicing above golden honey malts.
Lovely milkshake India Pale Ale variant, Milky Milky Shakey Shakey: Strawberry, draped milk-sugared vanilla creaming upon tart strawberry puree insistence and salted mango-guava subsidy, leaving its sharp citric hop bittering to contrast the sweet fruited medley given oated wheat flake spine.
2025 barrel-aged Imperial Stout Cuvee, Living In Darkness, brought dry oaken vanilla tannins and whiskeyed cocoa nibs to cuvee-inspired French wining, picking up pinot noir and dry port notes as well as wispy rye spicing and wayward strawberry tartness.