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Two Locals Brewery in University City was destined to stand out.
Founded by Liberian-American brothers Richard and Mengistu Koilor, the brewery, known for its Nubian Brown Ale, Good Jawn Pale Ale and a variety of lagers, is the first Black-owned brewery in all of Pennsylvania.
In the years leading up to their official launch in January 2024, Richard, 35, and Mengistu, 45, immersed themselves in the local brewing scene, reaching out to established breweries, participating in collaborative projects, and soaking up hands-on experience. These partnerships not only helped them hone their craft professionally but also helped them build a reputation that would carry over when they opened their own doors.
“When I first started brewing, I didn’t live too far from Dock Street [Brewery], and I had brought them some of my first brews,” Richard said. “They let me spend a couple of brew days with them — that was just a little taste.”
Richard hoped that a collaboration was the next step, but they weren’t quite there yet. They would need to build their brand before breweries, including Dock Street, would collaborate with them.
In the summer of 2020, at the height of awareness around the Black Lives Matter movement, they landed their first collaboration with Dock Street. Then they landed another, and another. In all, they would collaborate with a dozen local and regional breweries, including Love City, Brewery ARS, Punch Buggy, Bonn Place and Attic Brewing. Their collabs reached as far as New York and Pittsburgh.
The community of brewers was supportive and open to sharing their methods, Richard said.
“There’s no secrets in the brew house, because that’s the only way that the beer is going to get better,” he said. “I like to look at brewing beer like cooking, because everybody’s system is a little bit different…. you can have somebody’s recipe, you can get it to taste good, close to what the other person is making, but it’s always going to have a small nuance.”
Two Locals becomes a community staple
Part of brewing beer, and a reason some brewers aren’t guarded, is that putting your own twist on it is the whole point, both with the brews themselves and the packaging they come in.
Two Locals’ West African-inspired branding was created through working with Afro-Indigenous owned Philly design studio Say Less.
In addition to collaborating with established breweries, Two Locals gradually moved toward opening its own taproom through contract brewing, a business arrangement where another brewery is hired to produce the beer, allowing a small brewing company to sell product without its own commercial brewing facility. The Koilors landed a small business investor and a bank loan, and Two Locals’ University City taproom officially opened at uCitySquare on January 31, 2024.
In its first year and a half, the taproom has become a fixture in the community. Beyond offering good brews, food from Liberty Kitchen, comedy nights and open mics, they also support local organizations struggling with federal funding cuts — like the community healthcare provider Bebashi.
From Liberia to 51st and Catherine
Like many professional brewers, the Koilor brothers started with home brewing back in 2016. As they started to get serious with it, they noticed that their culture wasn’t represented much in the industry.
“That was the catalyst,” younger brother Richard told Technical.ly. “We were just trying to represent for our culture.”
The Koilor family immigrated to West Philadelphia when Mengistu was a child. Richard, a decade younger, was born in the US. They grew up on 51st and Catherine.
Even with the gap in age, the brothers are close and have grown to share a love for brewing their own beer.
They thought their home brews tasted just as good as the professional microbrews they’d had locally. But brewing at home and brewing even small batches professionally are completely different processes. Richard and Mengistu understood finances — before Two Locals, they were an accountant and a financial analyst, respectively — but learning to run a microbrewery was something that needed to be done with direct experience.
It isn’t easy, but Richard’s advice to aspiring brewery entrepreneurs is to get out there and brew.
“If you’re serious about doing it, you want to put yourself out there,” he said. “Get some hands-on experience.”
As they look toward the fall, Richard said they plan to start offering some food made in-house, including the popular West African dish jollof rice, and seasonal brews including a smoked Oktoberfest-inspired lager and a sweet potato beer instead of the now-traditional pumpkin beer.
“We want to keep building the traffic in our taproom … and then hopefully get a second taproom,” Richard said. “That’s always the goal, to try to sell more beer.”
