Today, you can go into the Farm & Fisherman and order a Tito’s and soda, yes, but you can also order a ramp Gibson with Stateside vodka, fino sherry, ramp brine, and a chive-blossom garnish, a gesture at the pickled onion garnish for a classic Gibson. He knew he couldn’t clear out the bar and start from scratch instead, he took the approach of developing guests’ trust over the years. In some cases, he forages the ingredients himself, tending a large garden behind the restaurant.Ĭhilds took over the restaurant’s bar program in 2016, at which point it was already established as a neighborhood spot. As the beverage director at the Farm & Fisherman Tavern in Cherry Hill, Childs intentionally builds his cocktail program to highlight ingredients foraged and sourced from local farms. This tension between trying to reduce a business’s environmental impact and running a bar where people want to hang out remains top of mind for Danny Childs, too. Hidden Still Agave Spirit is imported from Mexico in large plastic totes, then distilled and proofed in Pennsylvania, a process that requires less energy than transporting heavy glass bottles of diluted spirits.įrom left to right: Post Haste chef Elise Black, co-owners Fred Beebe and Gabe Guerrero / Photograph by Gab Bonghi “Sure, we could just not have agave on the bar, but people expect it, and we don’t want to scare people, so we felt like we needed to have it,” Beebe explains. After much discussion, Beebe and Guerrero decided to use Hidden Still Agave Spirit, which is produced in Jalisco, Mexico, but diluted and bottled in Hershey, Pennsylvania. But the logistics of building a cocktail menu are far more complicated than adhering to a line on a map. The broad rule Guerrero and Beebe have given themselves is that they’re sourcing everything in their bar program east of the Mississippi River - an admittedly large geographic area. Conversations like these remain a constant at Post Haste. “We would have these long debates about whether it was better to get tomatoes that were grown in a greenhouse but weren’t organic, or if we should get tomatoes from northern Mexico that were grown organically but were grown in a monoculture,” Beebe remembers. They worked to source as close to 100 percent of the ingredients as they could from local and organic producers. While in school, the college’s snack bar closed and the two students convinced the administration to let them take over the operation. Guerrero and Beebe met in college, where they were both interested in international politics and agriculture. It’s a key element in Post Haste’s program, Guerrero and Beebe say, allowing them to eschew industrially farmed fruit in favor of buying yuzu, kumquats and limequats from a small farm in New Jersey. Superjuice - a technique in which citric and malic acid are combined with citrus peel, macerated, then blended with water and the juice of those fruits, and finally strained - produces eight times more juice than classic squeezing. Instead, Post Haste’s drinks menu includes a variation on a Penicillin cocktail that swaps Scotch for whiskeys made in Pennsylvania and the Finger Lakes, plus rosemary smoke, ginger-honey syrup, smoked pear juice, and yuzu superjuice. This means no Scotch, no lemons, no limes, no Sysco trucks. In an effort to present more environmentally responsible drinking options to their customers, they have designed their beverage program to reduce the miles ingredients must travel. Post Haste, a new bar in Kensington from Gabe Guerrero and Fred Beebe, is one of a handful of Philly-area drinking establishments attempting to challenge the status quo around sourcing. It’s commonplace - and sometimes celebrated - for bars to source whisky made in Japan, mezcal from Oaxaca, and gin produced in the United Kingdom, shaken with juice from citrus shipped in weekly from Florida or maybe Mexico. In contrast to restaurants’ commitment to telling you where your food hails from, the same principles are rarely applied to bar programs. Now, in 2023, menus list farms and local cheese makers like they’re as familiar as the concept of roast chicken itself. You’ve surely heard the phrase “farm to table.” In the early aughts, servers at (mostly) New American restaurants waxed poetic about the provenance of a Lancaster half-chicken and its accompanying baby greens. The Pearnicillin cocktail at Post Haste, a new 70-seat bar on Frankford Avenue in Kensington that aims to source all of their ingredients from east of the Mississippi River to cut down on the fuel needed to transport liquor, citrus, and more.
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