Local 44 holds the corner of 44th and Spruce in Spruce Hill, and it has been West Philadelphia's neighbourhood beer bar for years, with twenty rotating drafts and a bottle shop two doors down. The kitchen turns out burgers and pub plates that keep pace with the taps.
Who would love it: drinkers who track a rotating draft board and want a real kitchen behind it, plus vegans, who get more than a token option here. Who would hate it: anyone after table service and a hush, because this is a busy corner bar that fills on weekends.
The room is a working neighbourhood tavern rather than a showpiece, which is the point. A square bar anchors the space, the booths fill with University City regulars, and the board above the taps is the first thing most drinkers read. It is the kind of corner bar a neighbourhood treats as a default, not a special-occasion stop.
The beer program is the reason to come. Twenty taps rotate often enough that regulars check the board before ordering, and the lineup mixes local Pennsylvania breweries with harder-to-find guest pours rather than leaning on the same year-round list. The attached Local 44 Bottle Shop lets you carry out what you liked, which makes a visit a buying trip as much as a drinking one.
The pedigree matters here. Local 44 runs in the same family as Memphis Taproom, Strangelove's, and the Belgian Cafe, a Philadelphia group with a long beer track record, so the cellar work and the tap rotation are handled by people who do this across several rooms. That shows in how fresh the board stays week to week and in how the staff talk about what is on.
Work the draft list first and ask what is fresh on, since the lineup turns over quickly. The burger is the kitchen's calling card, and the menu keeps strong vegan choices rather than treating them as an afterthought, a point regulars on Yelp return to often. Weekday happy hour, roughly 5pm to 7pm, is the value window for both food and drink.
What regulars say: reviewers consistently flag the rotating taps and the kitchen as the draw, with the vegan options praised more than at most beer bars, while the common complaint is the noise and the wait for a table on weekend nights. It is a bar to settle into on a weeknight rather than to expect a quiet corner on a Saturday.
Best time to go: weeknights and weekend brunch are the calmer windows, with brunch running Saturday and Sunday from late morning, a good time to read the board without a crowd. The corner sits a short walk from the University City transit lines, which makes it an easy first or last stop on a West Philly night.
It sits among the best craft beer bars in Philadelphia and earns a spot in our global craft beer bars guide. Map a wider crawl from the Philadelphia bar guide.
The corner sits in Spruce Hill, a short walk from the University City trolley lines and an easy ride from Center City, which makes it a practical first or last stop on a West Philly night. The attached bottle shop keeps its own hours and is worth a look on the way out for anything that stood out on the board. For a longer crawl, the West Philadelphia beer bars sit within a manageable radius, and Local 44's steady rotation makes it the reliable anchor of that route rather than a one-off.
Sources: Local 44 official site; Yelp (updated 2026); Wanderlog; Local 44 Instagram.
