Pennsylvania Breweries and Bube’s Catacombs
I tend to put things off to the last moment so that I can maximize the spontaneity in my life, so I hadn’t gotten around to ordering Lew Bryson’s Pennsylvania Breweries guide before we left New York. Just to show you how spontaneous I am, up until a week before this Pennsylvania brewpub tour, I thought I was going on a Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware brewpub tour. Lew Bryson has a book for that region also.
Actually, I figured that Lew Bryson’s Pennsylvania Breweries guide would be readily available at any of the fine brewpubs of Pennsylvania, and I was right. The first day of our tour, I found a copy of Bryson’s book at Bube’s. Along with the guidebook, I bought a Bube’s Brewery tee-shirt and a sampler pack of Pennsylvania beers.
While we were exploring the Bube’s complex another of the servers opened up the Catacombs for us and invited us to go down and look at that. Down some narrow rock hewn stairs was a system of three stone vaults. The largest and central vault had a stone floor with a trough running down the middle. Our guide explained that this was part of the original Bube’s Brewery. The upper adjacent vault contained three barrels the size of minivans. The barrels lay on their sides. I assume this is where the beer was lagered after the primary fermentation stage in the room above. A lower vault accessed by a short flight of stairs off the back of the main vault didn’t contain any large barrels but its rear wall showed part of the original cave system. Our guide explained that there used to be a network of caves under the town of Mount Joy. He said these caves were used to hide escaped slaves. Presumably, this was before the brewery was built. Sadly, the cave system has fallen victim to modern large truck traffic and large sections of the caves have collapsed.
Our guide also explained that they served dinner in the Catacombs beginning at 5:30 pm. Dinner begins with a tour of the Bube’s Brewery complex and ends with a fine meal in one of these underground lagering cellars. Reservations are requested prior to dinning in the Catacombs, so call ahead.
