After 20 years of slinging apples and tending bars in Philly, two cider devotees join forces to create Pip’s, a comfortable, orchard-to-glass taproom in Fishtown.
Tucked away in an alley in Philadelphia, a neon green apple points the way to Pip’s. Inside, soft lighting and comfy couches invite guests to sit and stay a while. The pool table is always free, and friendly faces behind the bar offer a guided tour of ciders grown and pressed in the Pennsylvania Fruit Belt.
A collaboration between Ploughman Cider proprietor, Ben Wenk, and director of Philly Cider Week, Amy Hartranft, this new Fishtown hangout officially opened its doors while ringing in the New Year in 2026—but the seeds of this business were sown 20 years ago.
The Olive Garden & the Farmers Market
After growing up outside the city in Montgomery County Pennsylvania, Amy moved to Philadelphia in 2006. The Olive Garden in Center City was her entry point into the Philly hospitality industry. But it wasn’t too long till she moved on to the fine dining scene, adding Vedge, a.Kitchen, a.Bar, Wm. Mulherin’s Sons, and Petruce to her resume.
It was at a.Kitchen that she met sommelier Tim Kweeder. Amy says, “Tim introduced me to the world of natural wine and during that time I found that many of the natural wine purveyors in the city also carried a small selection of cider. But these were nothing like the sweet commercial cider I had enjoyed in my youth and had already lost the taste for. These were born of places like France, England, Spain, Italy, and even Estonia; bone dry and complex, made using traditional wine methods, and sometimes even from wild foraged apples. I discovered what few even now understand: that cider is simply wine made from apples.”
Ben didn’t move to Philly, but it was around the same time that he became a regular, so to speak. After studying agroecology at Penn State, he returned to Three Springs Fruit Farm, his family’s seventh generation orchard in fruit-rich Adams County, Pennsylvania. In 2007 he got an email seeking vendors for the new Headhouse Farmers Market in Philadelphia. Selling directly to customers would be a departure for the farm, which primarily sold to packing houses and processors like Knouse Foods.
Ben says, “I felt like I wanted to contribute a new enterprise to the family business, and that [market] felt like something that I was able to manage—certainly at the beginning with a ton of help—that also allowed my father and uncle to remain doing the things they had been doing very successfully.”
It was early on in that first summer selling fruit in Philly that Ben says he and his dad popped into a bar near Headhouse to grab a fateful post-market beer. Or so he thought, ordering based on the tap handle alone—it turned out to be a Strongbow cider. In that moment, a lightbulb went off.
Having only ever had very sweet ciders before, Ben describes the dry, crisp beverage in his hand as “kind of revelatory. Like oh, wow, cider is something that is different than what I’ve understood it to be.” He says talk began right then, “we were like, ‘geez, we grow a lot of apples. We could put something together like this…’”
Digging In
But it would take almost a decade for Ploughman Cider to come to fruition. Getting it going involved a lot of reading and research, a fortuitous meeting with cidermaker Edwin Winzeler, studying under Peter Mitchell, and taking a leap of faith on a crop of apples grown specifically for cidermaking. “We ordered our first trees in 2013, custom budded, planted them in 2015, and bottled our first cider on December 2nd in 2016.”
It was around the same time that Amy was returning to Philly after some time away. She now describes herself as a “hospitality lifer,” but after a decade working in bars and restaurants, she says, “I needed to press pause and figure out: ‘Am I really going to stay in this industry?’” So she went to farm in Peru.
Meanwhile, at Headhouse, Ben had been cultivating a network of connections among Philly chefs and apple enthusiasts. By the time Ploughman hit the market there was a growing interest in cider as an agricultural beverage, and those relationships cultivated at the farmers market quickly translated to a loyal customer base.
“Right off the bat, we saw our sales footprint growing far and wide in Philadelphia,” he says. These days Ploughman Cider is reliably on tap and in fridges at over 60 establishments across the city, with another 20 or so in and out of the rotation.
Amy had worked at several of those establishments, and her love for cider grew as she connected with local farm-based cideries and the growers behind them, like Ben. “I got to know cider as an agricultural beverage, and got to know the people producing them locally. People like Ben, who are really ‘boots on the ground’ out in the orchards and pouring everything they’ve got into this.”
When she returned to Philly from Peru, re-energized and with an even deeper appreciation of those who tend the land, she teamed up with Tim Kweeder for an event focusing on orchard-driven cider. Featuring local cideries in addition to European imports, the event sold out and would grow into Philly Cider Week.
Between Philly Cider Week and the founding of the PA Cider Guild, for both Ben and Amy, cider had now shifted from an interest to a mission. Amy says, “I think cider is really misunderstood. So many people dismiss cider based on one that they tried, and ultimately miss out on the vast category that cider is. In the same way that we don’t shop through wine grape varieties at the supermarket, the public doesn’t see all that the apple can be beyond what they’ve seen in the produce section.”
A Tasting Room of One’s Own
So why did the two set out to open a bar together? From Ploughman’s perspective, Ben says, “there’s a lot of things that we make that we’re very proud of that just don’t have any availability in Philadelphia, where so many of our most loyal supporters live. So, having the ability to fill as many as 13 dedicated taps with our cider, and giving people access to things that they wouldn’t be able to try otherwise… that was a really important part of what we wanted to do with the space.”
Pip’s is the second dedicated outpost for Ploughman, which opened a taproom closer to the orchard in late 2019. Ben says they hadn’t been looking to open a bar at the time, but when the opportunity presented itself at a prime location in downtown Gettysburg, it just seemed to make sense.
But, he says, there was a steep learning curve. “We became not only first-time bar owners, who, as farmers, I mean, we didn’t know what we didn’t know back then. But, you know, we also had to figure out how to do it during a global pandemic.”
It turned out they were pretty good at it. The taproom business model proved to be a success and helped spread local awareness of cider grown in South Central Pennsylvania. “But still,” says Ben, “we knew that 60 to 70% of Ploughman Cider drinkers were a two-and-a-half-hour drive from our Gettysburg taproom.”
Ben had looked casually at several dozen places around Philly over the years, but none quite fit the bill—until the summer of 2025 when a realtor reached out to him about the place on Lee Street in Fishtown. The location piqued his interest. “Fishtown is one of the neighborhoods where we have a lot of accounts, and there’s a vibrant food and beverage scene in this area.”
Ben showed the place to Amy, who was tending bar just a block away at Middle Child Clubhouse. For Amy, the location meant she would be serving the same guests she’d gotten to know over her four years in the neighborhood. She adds, “losing Hale & True earlier that year was such a blow.” They both felt like the Philly cider scene needed a place like this.
Ben says, “we both had a vision and an expectation for what we wanted the guest experience and the whole service and hospitality side of things to be.” Between the location and the timing, they both agreed, “all the boxes were being checked.”
Sometimes You Wanna Go
They signed the lease in October and pulled together a soft opening in time for Philly Cider Week at the end of the month. Ben says, “that’s a testament to Amy’s vision and her hard work to get that turnaround complete. Even the idea that we would have our grand opening on New Year’s Eve, which was a five-month timeline, is absurd. But we had a very motivated team and a unified vision.”
Amy says, “when I was bartending, you know, it’s Friday night, finishing up a shift. There’s few bars open nearby and they’re all going to be loud and crowded at that hour. I’d rather go wind down from the day and have a drink in someone’s living room. So I wanted to build us a chill neighborhood bar that felt cozy and would be open late for all the local restaurant workers getting off their busy shift.”
Ben says his favorite thing on tap now is a tap itself. “We just installed a special long-pour tap for our Spanish-style ciders.” He explains, pointing up toward the ceiling, where it’s installed, “cider in Spain mostly is poured from a good height because it’s best enjoyed by aerating it, for a variety of nerdy reasons I’m happy to go into if people are interested.”
The bar also features several local beers on tap, and Amy has developed a cocktail menu highlighting Pennsylvania ingredients. Slices of tomato pie, from Liberty Kitchen around the corner, are also served up on Fridays and Saturdays, and hot dogs are available every day until last call.
Ben credits Amy with Pip’s clever name, a common term for apple seeds. He adds, “it’s also just really fun to say and easy to be like, ‘Hey, I’m getting off my shift at 11:00. You want to swing by Pip’s on the way home?’ It just feels like a place that you want to go.”
With Ploughman and Three Springs veteran Britt Evans and seasoned bartender Sam O’Neil rounding out the staff, Pip’s aims to provide an intimate third space for friends in the industry and cider fans, while still being approachable for the uninitiated and even the skeptical. Ben remembers, afterall, why someone might have written off cider or just never fully understood all the things it could be. And Amy loves getting the opportunity to help people understand.
She describes talking with guests new to cider, “or who just know they don’t want something sweet. Everything we make is technically dry, so let’s talk about acidity. Do you enjoy something very low in acid but earthy, maybe some minerality? What about in the middle, bright acidity, like white wine vibes? Or something high acid, tart, sour, funky, weird? What about smells? Fruity, herbaceous, citrusy, floral? And those are just the broader categories to get started.” She adds, “To experience, in real time, someone changing their mind about cider …to see the expression on their face when they try something that surprises them. That’s what it’s all about.”