Love City Brewery’s ‘Eraserhood’ IPA is a tribute to former Callowhill resident David Lynch
"This Hazy IPA is a nod to his dream, the worlds that he created within his movies.”
Weeks before Callowhill’s Love City Brewery opened in April 2018, the team was putting together its first beer list for the tap room. Most of the offerings were finalized but there was still some room for limited releases.
“At the time, no one in Philly was making Hazy IPAs. So we were like, ‘Well, I guess we should make one of these,’” said Mo Stubbs, the Brewery’s sales director.
They did. And when it came to finding a name for it, they only had to look around the neighborhood.
Filmmaker and PAFA alum David Lynch, who passed away on Thursday at age 78, lived at 13th and Wood streets during the 1960s — a quarter mile away from where Love City now stands. His 1977 breakout film Eraserhead, made right after he left Philly, was filmed in California. But Lynch said in a 2014 interview with Criterion, that the film “came out of the air in Philadelphia.”
The city then, as Lynch described in a 1987 BBC documentary, was “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.” And therefore, a natural inspiration for Eraserhead, which is about a tormented man named Henry whose mutant creature-like child drives him insane with its wails.
“It was my Philadelphia Story. It just doesn’t have Jimmy Stewart in it!,” Lynch said to Criterion.
Philly residents, in a bid to honor the debt it’ll forever owe to Lynch, came to colloquially call the filmmaker’s estwhile neighborhood “Eraserhood” — also the name Stubbs’ team decided for the new beer.
While some non-believers continue to call the neighborhood by other names — Callowhill, Loft District, North Chinatown — the Brewery folks thought the new beer name was a “no brainer.”
“This Hazy IPA is a nod to his dream, the worlds that he created within his movies,” Stubbs said. The neighboring PhilaMOCA’s annual “Eraserhood Forever” art show — “an artistic celebration of the work of David Lynch” — made for a strong case for the name as well.
“My husband and our tap room manager were in a band that played at that event before. So this has been the fabric of this community for a long time, way before we even opened Love City,” Stubbs said.
What was planned to be a one-time brew for opening day became a crowd favorite and Love City never stopped making Eraserhood. “It’s become one of our most popular brews,” said Stubbs.
“It seems like a happy accident that our can design has a chevron [pattern] on it, which I like to link to the Black Lodge scenes in the Twin Peaks series,” said Stubbs, a Lancaster native who has been a Lynch fan since she was a teenager. The can, she added, is also black and grey as a nod to the black and white film.
“He has been a massive inspiration,” said Stubbs, who even wanted to add a little image of Henry’s creepy reptile-baby on the can.
“You know, just like an Easter egg, on the back. I got voted down on that.”