The Populists

Co-owners Jeremy Myers, Rob Jahn, and Steve Capelli have racked up a stack of awards for the brewery and for their lagers in four short years, but their drive for technical execution, excellence, and experimentation has driven them to tackle the high-minded world of sour and barrel-aged beers as well. Just don’t call their beer precious, because they’re…

IF YOU’RE THE SORT

of person to call craft beer “esoteric,” put it on a pedestal, or approach it with a holier-than-thou mentality, keep that attitude far outside the garage door that separates the grunge tasting room from the washed masses at Croydon, Pennsylvania’s Neshaminy Creek Brewing. Yes, a lot of industry folks do rail against effete beer snobs. They curse when ridiculing them to friends and may even tell them off to their faces. But most don’t necessarily do it as vehemently as Jeremy Myers, cofounder and head brewer of the suburban Philly brewery.

“People ask me why I make cream ales. Because I f *#king like cream ales,” he quarrels. “Putting beer on some level that people consider esoteric is the antithesis of why people should be making beer. ‘Esoteric’ is a ridiculous word to apply to farmhouse [ales], for example, because they were used to pay lower-class farmhands, and we’ve raised them to this level of audacity that blows my damn mind.” Told you. In the craft-beer world, Myers can probably get away with saying just about anything. It’s not because people expect it from the no-bullshit brewer who blasts Pantera, AC/DC, and beer collaborators/ friends-of-the-brewery, The Menzingers, throughout the 57,700-square-foot brewery. It’s not even because he moonlights as a hardcore bassist and co-owner of a print shop and punk, ska, and reggae label, Jump Start Records, which operates literally in the basement of the house he shares with his wife and infant daughter.

No. It’s because he puts his beer where his mouth is.

Since opening in June 2012, Neshaminy Creek has racked up an enviable amount

“We’ve made a wheat stout, smoked chocolate rye stout, a wheat wine. Will they be good?” asks Jeremy Myers. “I think the better question is, ‘Will we be satisfied?’ I don’t think we’ll ever be 100 percent satisfied. That’s an attitude from my punk-rock side that I can’t shake.”