THE NOISY, laughing, tearful, music-filled scene inside Village Idiot Brewery, in Mount Holly, N.J., was exactly what Rich Palmay wanted.

His business partner was tending bar.

His family and friends were gathered ’round tables.

His son was playing an upright bass.

Everyone’s glass was filled with his beer.

And there was Palmay, cigar stuck in his mouth, taking it all in.

It was just a photograph on the wall, part of a memorial display that Village Idiot installed after its 56-year-old co-owner collapsed and died in the brewhouse on the night of Aug. 19.

And, yet, with each sip of Palmay IPA – the beer he was making that fateful evening – the crowd could taste and feel his presence.

They traded stories. They took another sip. They raised their glasses.

They remembered and cried and remembered and drank.

“It’s bittersweet,” said Brian Plyant, a Merchantville, N.J., graphic artist who’d known Palmay through their home-brewing club. “I feel honored to be drinking it. But it’s sad because, unless we find an old bottle of his home-brew stashed somewhere, this is the last Rich Palmay beer I will ever taste. “

Nearby, Ted McComb, of Riverton, N.J., took another gulp from his glass.

“It’s delicious,” he said. “It’s everything Rich said it would be. “

McComb was alone with Palmay in the brewhouse on his last night. A beer enthusiast, he had won a charity auction to brew at Village Idiot.

“I didn’t know Rich before that night,” McComb said. “We just talked about beer the whole time – the types of beer we liked, the whole brewing process.

“He was just awesome.

“We had ordered some food from the pizza place across the street, and we were cleaning up the spent grain when it happened.

“Here I was, having a wonderful time with Rich, and he just collapsed.

“It was the first time I ever spent any time with him. It was just a surreal experience. “

As part of the auction, McComb had won the privilege of naming the beer. A few days after the funeral, he got a call from Palmay’s partner, Vince Masciandaro.

“Vince is saying, ‘Do you mind if I name the beer after Rich? ‘

“I told him, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. Of course you have to name the beer after Rich. ‘ “

Masciandaro poured me a glass and handed it over with a sad smile.

Across the room, Palmay’s widow, Noreen, choked back tears.

“I met Rich when we were in high school – we were married 31 years,” she said. “At first, brewing was just a hobby he developed in the garage.

“He’d come back into the house, talking about beers he brewed, the flavors and so on.

“Look, I’m not really a big beer person, and I could only handle so much talk about beer. So, one day I just told him, ‘Rich, honey, you’ve got to go out and find some friends who share your passion. ‘

“That’s when he joined the home-brew club, Barley Legal, and that led to this great friendship with Vince.

“The two of them spent so many afternoons brewing together. At some point they decided they wanted to do it as, you know, a real business.

“I told him, ‘Go for it. ‘ I loved him so much, and I knew that this is what he had to do. “

She looked around the room.

“For the first time in my life, I’m meeting so many of the people in the beer world that Rich lived in, putting faces to names.

“I’m so sorry he’s not here to see this.

“Rich is gone, but I feel his spirit. “

Every brewer makes his last beer, of course. And, yet, his beer lives on.

Its yeast will ferment another batch.

His friends will raise another glass.

The flavor will mingle with the memories.

The brewer is dead. Long live the brew.

-30-

DID YOU catch the raucous St. Louis Cardinals locker-room celebration after they clinched their third consecutive division title in the final days of the regular season?

Yeah, I know – I hate ’em, too. The Cardinals, as comedian/Cubs fan Bill Murray put it, are “Satan’s messengers on earth. “

But you have to give them credit, for, in a little-noticed gesture, the team took a big step toward ending a despicable tradition that has plagued baseball for more than a half-century.

Instead of popping the cork on bottles of Champagne, they celebrated their victory with beer.

Beer! Not wine. Not the seeping excrement of crushed grapes. Not corked bottles labeled with foreign words and les accents aigu. Not the bourgeois symbol of pretension and privilege.

Finally, an end to the defilement of our American pastime.

I’ve been seething about Champagne in locker-room celebrations for years, horrified at the sight of ballplayers openly bathing themselves in French bubbly.

Need I remind you? Baseball is mom and apple pie, not Moet & Chandon.

Yet, old newspaper accounts show that baseball has toasted its champions with Champagne since at least the early ’40s. By the 1954 World Series, the tradition had become so ingrained that New York Giants outfielder Dusty Rhodes – a good ol’ boy from Alabama who wouldn’t know a grand cru from a grand slam – would be quoted in the New York Times, complaining that owner Horace Stoneham had failed to stock the winning dressing room with magnums of Champagne.

Baseball didn’t invent Champagne celebrations, of course.

In his 19th-century treatise, A History of Champagne, British author Henry Vizetelly wrote:

“We cannot open a railway, launch a vessel, inaugurate a public edifice, start a newspaper, entertain a distinguished foreigner, invite a leading politician to favour us with his views on things in general . . . without the aid of Champagne. “

Still, you don’t see other sports celebrate with Champagne. Super Bowl champs don’t spray the stuff; they douse themselves with buckets of Gatorade. Indy 500 winners chug down a quart of milk.

The only other sport that routinely toasts with Champagne is Formula 1 racing, and, well, they’re a bunch of scarf-wearing Europeans.

I blame the Yankees for baseball’s embrace of the Dark Side. Of course, I blame the Yankees for almost everything. But in this case, there’s no other explanation.

Champagne is big-city booze. It’s bright lights and Broadway. It’s Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford at the Copacabana. It’s A-Rod and Derek Jeter canoodling with supermodels. Champagne could’ve been introduced to baseball only by fat-cat New Yorkers.

Surely the pin-stripers’ 27 world championships – and, more important, the 27 Champagne-soaked celebrations that followed – are responsible for befouling the game.

We saw signs of the disgraceful tradition crumbling last season, after San Francisco clinched the National League pennant. Giants ace Madison Bumgarner – himself a good ol’ boy from Hickory, N.C. – celebrated by simultaneously chugging six bottles of beer.

Then, St. Louis went all in, popping cans of Budweiser as they celebrated their 2015 division championship.

It was a thing of beauty.

A paradigm shift.

Baseball had thrown off the shackles of Champagne.

And, yet, it passed with little notice.

Rather than recognizing its importance, sportswriters and other commentators sniffed about the contrived nature of postgame celebrations, about Anheuser-Busch’s branding of the festive event, about the “mixed message” of responsible drinking in the midst of so much alcohol. Some even complained about players wearing goggles to protect their eyes from the spray of suds, as if it were somehow unmanly.

So, it is left to us, the beer-drinking baseball fans of America, to toast the occasion:

The Champagne Sham is dead! Long live baseball and beer!

(Lot of good it did the Cardinals. )

-30-

WHAT BEER NEEDS is a superhero.

One of those comic-book action figures – let’s call him (or her) Sudzzler: Faster than a speeding bar tab. Able to open a wax-sealed cork-and-cage bottle with a single twist. More powerful than a multinational industrial-brewing conglomerate. Pitted in an ageless battle against evil archenemy Dr. Wino.

Superpowers include:

Ice-vision, to instantly chill warm beer.

Shape-shifting belly.

Tapakinesis, the ability to use one’s mind to attract a bartender’s attention when the crowd is three-deep.

Invulnerability to excessive hops.

Belching. Really big belches.

Till Marvel inks up Sudzzler, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with the newly published The Comic Book Story of Beer (Ten Speed Press, $18.99). Wonderfully illustrated by Aaron McConnell, the story by Jonathan Hennessy and Mike Smith is a graphic depiction of the 9,000-year-long history of beer.

In this age of beer reverence (the next book on my reading list is Jeff Alworth’s 644-page The Beer Bible), I suspect some will dismiss a comic book as heresy. Beer is serious stuff worthy of pointy-headed academic scholarship, right?

Well, firstly, this is not one of those pulp rags we used to page through as kids. It’s solid, thoroughly researched and indexed. It’s closer to Classics Illustrated – those old comics we’d scan rather than cracking open the real Robinson Crusoe – than “The Amazing Spider-Man. “

And secondly, beer has a long history as a common, almost vulgar drink of the masses that’s perfectly suited to a comic-book treatment.

In tracing beer’s evolution, The Comic Book Story of Beer says the drink was once so revered that ancient Egyptians wrote poems in its honor. Even some early Old Testament references to alcoholic drink likely referred to beer, not wine.

What happened?

“It’s very possible,” the book says, “that the many academics who worked to translate the Bible expunged from it all mention of beer. “

Why? Blame it on the ancient Greeks.

They were wine drinkers, cavorting among the ample grapevines of their countryside. They had no history of making and drinking beer. To them, beer was the barbaric drink of their enemies to the north.

So, they demonized beer. “The Greek playwright Aeschylus depicted Lycurgus of Thrace, ‘The King of the Barbarians,’ killing the disciples of Dionysus, the god of wine. ” Other Greek scholars wrote that beer was nothing but the “revolting” by-product of plant rot that caused “bad phlegms and elephantitis. “

In other words, these early Greeks, whose writings laid the groundwork for centuries of academic and biblical scholarship, were wine snobs.

Thus, beer’s status was reduced “to the drink of everyday folk. “

We barbarians would eventually have our day. Beer survived and flourished in northern Europe, where it was impossible to grow grapes. Christian monasteries that pledged allegiance to wine-drinking Rome nonetheless survived through the Middle Ages by making and selling beer.

Of course, the history of beer is far more complex than its battle against wine, and this book ably puts it into the context of other world events: the expansion of European capital and the plague that nearly wiped out a continent; the writings of Shakespeare and the growth of religious freedom; the American Revolution and Hitler’s beer-hall putsch.

There are villains: the medieval Gruitrechmafia and prohibitionist Carry Nation, among others.

But they are no match for the likes of William Penn, Benjamin Franklin and FDR. Fritz Maytag, the man who revived San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing, gets his due, and so does Jack McAuliffe, who opened New Albion Brewing Co., in 1976, as America’s first modern microbrewery.

And so does Michael Jackson, the British newspaperman whose seminal World Guide to Beer gave the craft-beer movement “a good, hard shove. ” Regrettably, you could argue that that book also sparked some of the current navel-gazing that beer freaks (myself included) can be guilty of.

The Comic Book Story of Beer reminds us that beer is both serious stuff . . . and fun. Oddly, though it’s a history full of superheroes, there are no alter-egos.

Where is Brews Wayne?

Meet authors Jonathan Hennessey and Mike Smith at Yards Brewing, 901 N. Delaware Ave., from 4 to 7 p.m. Oct. 21.

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IT TAKES BRICKS and people to build a neighborhood, but don’t forget to bring along the beer.

That’s the message from Ken Weinstein, a private Germantown developer who has converted scores of vacant and deteriorated commercial properties, including some of the city’s popular beer-centric destinations. On Tuesday, he’ll lead a fun but wonky pub-crawl in Mount Airy, called “Beer: An Agent of Change. “

I caught up with him last week for a few pints at Earth Bread + Brewery, one of the properties he owns and helped convert into one of the city’s flourishing brewpubs. Here are excerpts of our conversation.

Q: What do you mean “agent of change”?

A: If you take a look at Mount Airy, it was a very different place 15 years ago, looking for an identity . . . There were a lot of vacant, deteriorated properties. A lot of day cares and hair salons on [Germantown] Avenue. Meanwhile, the residential neighborhoods on either side of the avenue were in much better condition and higher quality than the avenue itself.

The avenue was calling for change. People wanted to walk to their own business district.

I think the elevation of beer came along the same time and really helped Mount Airy get to the next level.

Q: How, specifically, did beer help the neighborhood change?

A: We already had Brewer’s Outlet [beer distributor], which was doing well. We had McMenamin’s Tavern, which was an institution. But we needed more to make it a beer destination. So as we [Weinstein’s company, Philly Office Retail] started to buy up properties and renovate them, the logical choice to fill them was beer destinations.

It started with Cresheim Cottage Cafe [now closed], which was wine-oriented but quickly added good beer, thanks to the suggestions of Bob Wegbreit [a mutual friend from the suburbs who sat in on our conversation].

Then we opened the Trolley Car Diner with a very minimal beer list. We’ve also brought in Cresheim Grain Exchange and reopened Goat Hollow, which have great beer lists, too.

Q: Was there an “ah-ha” moment when you realized beer was becoming such a draw?

A: Definitely. It was when this place opened. Earth Bread + Brewery. It was the turning point of Mount Airy.

First of all, after we bought this property, it took us 2 1/2 years to push out Anglesea Pub [the former occupant] . . . Getting them to leave was really key.

Q: So, just to be clear, when you say beer is an agent of change, you mean good beer?

A: Well, yeah. I mean, as people become connoisseurs, you just can’t serve anything.

Q: How did you attract Tom Baker and Peggy Zwerver, the brewpub’s owners, to Mount Airy?

A: They were in New Jersey, and they were looking all over for a location. And, in fact, they had a lease negotiated in New York City. It didn’t work out, and somebody told them, “You should look in Mount Airy. “

They didn’t know what Mount Airy was, and I remember sitting down with them at the old coffee shop across the street, and they’re going on and on about their concept, about how they were going to recycle doors and fixtures, about sustainability, and I finally said to them: “You have no idea of how Mount Airy you already are. “

They just fell in – it was a perfect location. Of course, we spent $100,000, and so did they to really change this place around.

Q: I read once that Mount Airy is the most perfectly diversified ZIP code in America. It’s one of the reasons I love McMenamin’s. It’s the most diverse crowd of any bar I’ve ever been in my life, and I’m drawn to that. How did that happen in Mount Airy?

A: It’s just our history. It has been true since the ’50s, when Mount Airy and its leadership fought to keep it diverse, and it’s not easy. The second you take your eye off the ball, the diversity could easily leave. It’s something that we’re aware of and very proud of . . . And beer appeals to everyone – black, white, lesbian, straight, whatever.

Q: The other thing for me is that beer is so accessible and fits the image of Philly perfectly.

A: Agreed. And beer is a better fit for Mount Airy. We may not be very blue collarish here, but we’re also not snobbish.

“Beer: An Agent of Change” with Ken Weinstein, 7-9 p.m. Tuesday. Starts at Trolley Car Diner,

7619 Germantown Ave. Tix $20, mtairylearningtree.org. Info, 215-843-6333.

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T’S A THIN line between tribute and hokum.

On one side, the new Paterno Legacy Series beer from western Pennsylvania’s Duquesne Brewing is a heartfelt bow toward the memory of Penn State’s popular yet scandalized former head football coach, Joe Paterno.

On the other, well, who can forget Three Stooges Beer?

Or Harley-Davidson Beer? Or Kid Rock American Badass Beer? Or J.R. Ewing Beer? Or an entire cooler-full of other collectible cans in which the contents were an afterthought to the schlocky labels?

Novelty beers are a goof, of course – a tongue-in-cheek scheme to make a buck on a fad or celebrity.

Some, like Billy Beer, are wildly successful. That was the brand that Falls City Brewing produced in the late ’70s with President Carter’s redneck brother. “It’s the best beer I ever tasted,” said the label, autographed by Billy Carter himself. “And I’ve tasted a lot. “

According to some estimates, more than 2 billion cans were sold before the brewery folded.

The beer itself was a largely forgettable pale lager. Billy himself was said to favor Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Other novelty beers come and go. Intercourse Brewing, which attempted to trade on those bawdy Pennsylvania Dutch town names (e.g. Blue Ball Porter), never did much more than sell a bunch of T-shirts.

So, where does Paterno Legacy Series fit in?

For starters, it’s actually a decent beer – an extraordinarily smooth, red-colored Vienna-style lager whose clean-finishing, malt-forward flavor (and $22 case price) is geared toward the Yuengling Lager crowd. Yes, the attraction of the cans will drive sales. But a good bit of it is packaged in kegs for taprooms, where the liquid will have to stand on its own.

More to the point, both Duquesne and the Paterno family seem dead serious about their beer. They say it’s a fitting tribute to the coach’s career – one that will eventually raise money for charitable causes.

“It’s not a novelty beer,” said Mark Dudash, a former Pittsburgh Brewing executive who revived the defunct Duquesne brand five years ago. “Our idea is to build a brand, not come out with a gimmick-y can you’d just buy and put on a shelf.

“If we were going for a gimmick, we could have easily charged $40 or $50 a case and gotten out after a quick hit. That’s not the case at all. “

Jay Paterno, the coach’s son, whose company, Blue Line 409, partnered with Duquesne to market the beer, agreed.

“The idea was to create a brand and a product that people would really enjoy, while raising money for charity,” said Paterno.

No details on the charity have been disclosed, yet.

Raising a buck for a good cause, however, is not unheard of in the beer world, nor is honoring a local sports star.

In San Diego, for example, AleSmith Brewing makes San Diego Pale Ale .394 as a tribute to ex-Padres star Tony Gwynn, and raises funds for a Tony Gwynn Museum.

Gwynn, though, was universally loved in Southern California. Paterno – his image tarnished by the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation scandal – is still a divisive figure in Pennsylvania.

Thus, it was hard to predict the success of JoePa beer.

The original plans called for a single, 500-barrel batch from City Brewing’s Latrobe, Pa., plant – a supply that Dudash thought would last till about midway through the college football season. But after taking orders from enthusiastic wholesalers, the production run quickly grew to 3,000 barrels.

Jay Paterno said, “We thought we’d do maybe 7,000 cases in pre-sales. Next thing you know, it was up to 40,000 cases. “

Nima Hadian, whose Shangy’s beer distributorship wholesales the brand in the Lehigh Valley, said he sold out of his first shipment of 2,000 cases in 63 minutes. “We’ve ordered another 6,000 cases for delivery in a week,” he said.

A second batch was brewed, and Dudash said that sales should continue through the college bowl games. “We’re already working on the cans for next year,” he said. “We’re in this for the long haul. “

A few notes to would-be collectors:

Don’t expect your can of Paterno Legacy Series to be worth more than a couple of bucks in 10, 20 or 100 years from now. With more than 1 million cans in circulation, there will never be anything rare about it.

The same goes for Billy Beer, Three Stooges Beer and all the other novelty cans in your attic.

If you’re going to save the can, drink the beer now. Full cans of old beer are worth even less because they sometimes rust or leak. To preserve its looks, open the can from the bottom.

-30-

PEOPLE WHO SAY they hate pumpkin beer remind me of people who say they never watch TV, as if they’re too good for something so unsophisticated. They stick up their noses and piss all over the spicy brew because it’s a gimmick, because it’s crass, because they’re oh-so-busy rereading War and Peace.

So, as they repeat the same, tired criticism (You can’t drink it in this kind of heat!), they’re missing out on some pretty good entertainment.

Well, put down the Tolstoy, Mr. Snoot, and tune into six things the pumpkin haters get wrong.

They come out too early.

It’s true, pumpkin beers now show up on the shelves in July and seem out of season. But every beer style – from springtime bock to wintertime holiday brews – comes out too early.

You might’ve noticed, also, that Christmas decorations go on sale in September and the Kmart mannequins are wearing bikinis in February. That’s the way the retailing works. The demand for products actually precedes the season.

It’s too warm to drink pumpkin beer.

Really? Tell that to the people of Tampa, Fla., where last year the temps hit 81 degrees on Halloween. Somehow the locals managed to suck down plenty of hometown favorite Cigar City Good Gourd Imperial Pumpkin Ale.

In the age of climate change, you better get used to drinking beer in warm weather, which leads me to a similar gripe:

It’s too hot to drink spiced beer.

C’mon, people eat spicy food all summer, so why not spiced beer?

In fact, one of the most popular warm-weather ales – Belgian-style witbier – is made with spice (coriander). So how is it that cinnamon and nutmeg are suitable only for Thanksgiving?

Indeed, Starr Hill Boxcarr Pumpkin Porter goes perfectly with hot dogs and baked beans. Give it a shot before you pack away the Weber this summer.

Pumpkin beer ought to be made with fresh pumpkin.

Nobody except jack-o’-lantern-carving Cub Scouts ever made anything with fresh pumpkins. That’s because pumpkins are essentially big lumps of fleshy pulp that we’d leave rotting in the field if early brewers hadn’t discovered that, in a squeeze, they’re a barely acceptable replacement for malt.

They aren’t particularly flavorful (in fact, they taste like something you’d scrape down the disposal), so while picking them fresh off the vine might sound cool, all that work adds little to the character of the beer.

Think about it: If canned pureed pumpkin was somehow bad, do you think your Aunt Florence would be using it all these years in her pumpkin pie?

Consider also that that neither malt nor hops are actually “fresh” when they go into the brew kettle, and most fruit beer is made with puree. So why should you care if the pumpkin was picked last year?

Pumpkin beers taste like . . .

Saying you hate the flavor of pumpkin beer is like saying you hate the flavor of beer, period. Not all pumpkins taste the same.

The ever-popular Southern Tier Pumking is big on vanilla; Dogfish Head Punkin Ale goes heavy on the nutmeg and clove.

The bottle of Elysian Punkuccino I enjoyed down the Shore over Labor Day weekend was one of the best coffee-flavored brews I’ve ever tasted. The fresh pint of Captain Pumpkin’s Maple Mistress they poured for me last month at Kutztown’s Saucony Creek Brewing went down like a sweet but balanced blend of maple syrup and buttered rum.

Think of pumpkin as blank pages in a book, waiting for a creative brewer to fill.

They’re a gimmick.

They’re no more gimmicky than session IPAs.

Don’t be a hater – give one a try. I’ve got a bunch of them in my Joe Sixpack seasonal case share with Bell Beverage of South Philly, now available online at joesixpack.net.

Meanwhile, Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant’s Chestnut Hill location will have a nice lineup on tap on Saturday. And look for four-packs of its Pumpkin Ale at all locations starting Friday.

-30-

FROM TIME to time, I like to check in with the U.S. Patent Office for a progress report on the exciting field of beer inventions.

Over the years, we’ve seen brilliant ideas, ranging from tooth protectors on beer bottles to beer pong tables that keep your beer cold. Honestly, if we could channel some of that ingenuity into, say, theoretical aerodynamics, we’d have those rocket packs by now.

So, what’s new? Here’s a handful of recent patent applications.

Shotgun Accessible Beer Can (#2015-0183547).

While this is not the first invention to improve chugging (see “Compartmented fluid dispensing apparatus” a/k/a beer bong), it is the first to claim that it reduces the risk of injury.

Shotgunning, for those who’ve managed to forget [Editor’s Note: or to avoid] fraternity hazing rituals, involves puncturing a can at the bottom, putting it in the mouth, then opening the flip top for a quick gush of suds. It can get messy, and a bit gory if you cut your tongue on the jagged edge of the punctured opening.

An easily opened perforated slot at the base of the can solves that problem. No more blood.

Bottles with Means to Prevent Gushing (#2015-0197371).

Don’t you just hate it when some joker clinks the top of your longneck bottle, forcing an explosion of foam onto your lap?

Scientists at Belgium’s University of Leuven hate it, too. Their solution: a thin film of molecules, called hydrophobes, that repel liquid. Sprayed on the inside of bottles, this film makes it impossible for bubbles to form on the neck.

No more wet pants!

System of Illuminated Tap Handles (#2015-0146412).

The so-called IllumiTap – a tap handle lit with LEDs – has been around for a few years. But now the company behind the invention has made them interactive.

Using a simple Bluetooth connection, beer-drinkers can receive text messages from the tap handles. That’s right, instead of a bartender patiently telling you that it’s a barrel-aged Russian imperial stout with a hint of vanilla, the tap handle can now share tasting notes.

You might think this is a dandy advance . . . until Judgment Day, when all our tap handles are controlled by Skynet.

Bottle Opener On Wrist (#2015-0114184).

The beer opener, I’ve argued, is the single most important invention in the history of beer. Of course, this argument also has gotten me tossed out of otherwise reputable bars, so my theory hasn’t exactly survived peer review.

Nonetheless, the inventor of this handy opener emphatically notes that bartenders frequently drop their hand-held openers “and because bars are dark, finding them on the floor was a time-consuming and annoying hassle. “

The solution? No, not a surgically embedded church key (though, tell me that wouldn’t be cool). This invention is an opener attached to a leather strap and then worn on the wrist. Somehow, you (oomph!) twist your wrist to (ugh!) pop off the cap.

The line for carpal tunnel lawsuits forms on the left.

Pedal-Powered Brewing System (#2015-0075386).

Sounds like someone has been watching too many episodes of “Gilligan’s Island. ” Pedaling a bike to generate electricity? That’s like whittling sticks to start a fire.

Those who are happily connected to the grid will laugh this one off – but the inventor offers an entrepreneurial twist. His idea is to line up bikes in a microbrewery, get customers to pedal like mad and then pay them back in the form of the beer they’ve helped brew.

The hell with that. I say this is contraption is the perfect opportunity for cheater Lance Armstrong to finally pay his debt to society.

Beer Pong (various, including #2014-0265136, #907087B2, #2014-0252718).

Who says tossing ping-pong balls into cups is a waste of tuition? College freshmen have submitted dozens of patent applications for various beer pong inventions. Among them:

– A tilted game table. Instead of arranging the cups on a flat surface, this device pivots the cups upward, like a skee-ball game.

– A device for adjusting the circumference of smaller cups to rest in larger cups. With this handy invention, you can fit a smaller Jell-O shot into a wider (and easier to hit) 16-ounce red Solo cup.

– A modular table. It’s a beer pong table that can fit into a briefcase . . . no doubt invented by a law-school student aiming for a summer internship. Bonus: It floats.

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WELL, IT’S about damn time.

Nearly 25 years after New Belgium Brewing started brewing in Fort Collins, Colo., its beloved Fat Tire Amber Ale is coming to Philadelphia.

That makes Pennsylvania the 39th state to get its hands on the brand, behind the likes of Alabama, North Dakota and, I think, Guam.

Fat Tire, of course, is a near-iconic brand in craft-beer circles.

Brewed by a famously green, socially conscious, employee-owned company, it may not be the highest-rated beer in the world, but – thanks partly to its fun, offbeat logo-it is certainly among its most recognizable.

Over the decades, thousands of Philadelphians have tasted the smooth, easy-drinking ale during travel to the Rockies, only to return home and discover that it was nowhere to be found.

One local beer wholesaler told me he remembers that the Foodery – the excellent bottle shop at 10th and Pine streets (now with outposts in Roxborough and Northern Liberties) – once kept an open slot in its coolers labeled, “Reserved for Fat Tire. “

“I think that was 17 years ago,” he said.

Since then, of course, the region has seen its own phenomenal growth in craft brewing. Neshaminy Creek, Boxcar, Philadelphia Brewing, Prism and Round Guys, among others, all started up in that time. Victory opened a second production facility; Yards, Flying Fish, Sly Fox and River Horse all moved into larger plants.

And that doesn’t even account for the soaring number of other out-of-town brands that have already established a foothold in the city.

So, when Fat Tire shows up on local tap lines and beer shelves starting Monday, it will be squeezing in among nearly 9,000 other brands now registered for sale in Pennsylvania.

In other words, that “reserved” slot at the Foodery is long gone.

How will New Belgium, the nation’s eighth-largest brewery, find a niche in Philly’s highly competitive market?

Largely, by pounding the pavement.

Months ago, the company hosted 100 representatives of the state’s wholesalers who will carry the brand (Penn Distributors in the city, Gretz Beer in the suburbs), and put them through intensive training at its own beer school, in Colorado. They toured New Belgium’s state-of-the-art brewing facilities and its massive barrel room; they learned its corporate identity (do-gooder sustainability, 100 percent employee ownership, bicycling cred); and they tasted beer, from Slow Ride Session IPA to its unusual Lips of Faith series.

These wholesaler reps will be on the front lines, selling Fat Tire to bars and bottle shops.

Meanwhile, New Belgium put its own fulltime team into the state, with a sales director, an area manager and a corps of so-called Beer Rangers who act as sales reps. (Most out-of-town craft brewers, by comparison, have a single local rep who’s often responsible for sales in several states. )

By pricing their 12-packs in the $19 range, they’ll position their brand against some of the other aggressive out-of-towners who’ve done well in the city lately-Lagunitas, Deschutes and Sierra Nevada.

And they’ll go heavy on events, including its Tour de Fat cycling exhibition.

The bar owners I’ve spoken with agree that the brand faces tough competition for tap handles – especially from beloved local breweries. Several noted that Fat Tire had lost some of its aura with age, as craft-beer drinkers “graduated” to more complex, hoppier flavors.

Indeed, it has become fashionably hip in beer geek circles to bash Fat Tire as too pedestrian.

Nonetheless, New Belgium’s early effort in Philadelphia is already paying off.

On Monday, Penn Distributors hosted a welcome reception for New Belgium at the Academy of Natural Sciences, inviting scores of area bar owners. The place was packed, and Penn was busily taking orders amid the museum’s dinosaur bones. It has reportedly sold more than 200 kegs to be tapped in New Belgium’s first weeks in town.

John Bouillon, a manager at Old City’s Irish Pol, told me that he was uncertain how many of his bar’s 40 taps would go to New Belgium.

“I expect we’ll be pouring it, though,” he said. “We’ve got guys just champing at the bit for Fat Tire. “

No wonder. We’ve been waiting 25 years.

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ANYONE who thinks that Philadelphia’s beer scene ends at the Schuylkill River needs to take Regional Rail to Norristown, hop onto the Rt. 99 bus for an hour or so, get off in Phoenixville, curse SEPTA and start walking.

This once-stinky Chester County town has transformed its dinky downtown alongside an abandoned steel mill into a lively restaurant and nightlife destination. In just three blocks along its main shopping corridor, Bridge Street, there are two brewpubs, a pair of winery outlets and a distillery.

Center City – with four times the population and a zillion times the number of tourists – has exactly one brewpub.

One!

That measly number was in the back of my mind as I pulled up in front of Stable 12, the new brewery just across the street from Phoenixville’s borough hall. Inside, Kelly Carbutt poured me samples, including an unusually strong (7.5 percent alcohol) and deliciously malty Helles.

Her husband, Chris, is one of the three young (just 27 years old) brewers who opened the place. They settled on Phoenixville after deals in King of Prussia and West Conshohocken fell apart.

“I think it’s is a real up-and-coming town,” Carbutt told me. “The demographics are exactly what you’d be looking for in craft beer: young, with disposable income. And the borough was very easy to work with. “

This didn’t just happen by itself, and it didn’t happen quickly. Phoenixville’s renaissance took millions of dollars in downtown investment, the renovation of the steel mill’s hulking foundry (now an event space) and 25 years of redevelopment projects, including a new 275-unit commercial-and-residential complex that will open shortly.

Jessica Capistrant, executive director of the Phoenixville Regional Chamber of Commerce, says the excitement surrounding that growth is what attracted the likes of Stable 12.

“It’s awesome that they chose Phoenixville,” Capistrant said. “They could have chosen other towns with more space or more parking, but they clearly saw something in the community. “

Indeed, Bridge Street on a Saturday afternoon is packed with pedestrians listening to street music, having coffee, grabbing bottles of wine for dinner at a BYOB. Cyclists from the recently extended Schuylkill River Trail catch their breath at Iron Hill Brewery’s outdoor seating area. Visitors try out the cocktails at the new Bluebird Distilling saloon.

Not surprisingly, police and merchants have reported an uptick in crime along Bridge Street.

But, overall, there’s a vibrancy that is only enhanced by the presence of locally made beer.

And it makes me wonder what Center City is missing out on. I’ll say it again: One brewpub! Thank the heavens for Chestnut Street’s 2nd Story Brewing.

I know I shouldn’t be so hard on the city. After all, its craft taproom scene is unparalleled, perhaps in the country.

But it’s locally made suds (think German-style pilsner and Belgian farmhouse ale) that defines a region’s beer. You can’t have your own identity if all you’re doing is selling out-of-town suds.

That’s why even city dwellers need to pay attention to what’s happening in Phoenixville.

Here’s a great opportunity: On Saturday, the town is hosting the daylong Phlight of the Phoenix Bar Tour, with stops at five locations in just a few hundred yards along Bridge Street:

Stable 12 Brewing Co., 368 Bridge St. It offers only a limited snack menu, but its 15-barrel brewhouse is already putting out a very wide selection. Try the Weizen and the Irish Stout.

Black Walnut Winery, 260 Bridge St. A range of hybrid wines from this Chester County winery, with live music.

The Barrel wine bar, 222 Bridge St. Across from the famous (“The Blob”) Colonial Theatre, it specializes in glasses from A’Dello Vineyard, in Perkiomenville.

Iron Hill Brewery, 130 Bridge St. Do not miss brewer Tim Stumpf’s outstanding Roggenbier at this brewpub, now in its 10th year.

Bluebird Distillery, 100 Bridge St. Located in a huge, former laundry, its saloon – with gin-based cocktails – is already an anchor at the east end of town.

Get your card punched at all five stops, and get a free T-shirt.

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