Drink: Pennsylvania Lager at 2nd Story Brewing

How "local" is your beer? It used to be that proximity of the brewery and clever references on the label would suffice.

But the local quotient has ratcheted higher, lately, as prime ingredients themselves have become sourced regionally, too, in particular grains grown and malted locally by a pair of relatively new malthouses, Deer Creek in Glen Mills and Double Eagle in Huntingdon Valley.

The cost is higher than malts imported, say, from Germany. But brewmaster John Wible at 2nd Story Brewing in Old City shows just how rewardingly vivid those fresh local grains can be in his toasty new Pennsylvania Lager, a deep-amber Vienna-style brew made with 95 percent barley and 5 percent rye from Deer Creek. With less hops than Wible's fine crisp house lager, Fritzie's, the Pennsylvania grain's character really shines through, nutty and rich like liquid bread with the subtle earthiness of stone-ground crackers. 2nd Story Brewing's sister farm in Pottstown, the Tilted Barn, will grow enough hops to make a few batches of a different "wet-hopped" brew this fall. And with Tilted Barn's plans to use more of its own fields for grain in future seasons, the local farm-to-fermenter gap should be closing even tighter still.

Pennsylvania Lager, $6 a pint, 2nd Story Brewing

117 Chestnut St., 117 Chestnut St., 267-314-5770; 2ndstorybrewing.com.