Beer, people, planet, printed on a card next to the salsa at 915 Spring Garden

Most mission statements are a paragraph on a website that nobody reads and nothing tests. The one at 915 Spring Garden Street is printed on a small card, propped on the table next to the salsa, where every person who eats there has to look at it. Harry Hayman photographed the card, and the sentence on it is the reason this post exists.

What Harry Hayman was looking at

Triple Bottom Brewing opened at 915 Spring Garden in 2019. The name is not a pun about beer. It is the actual triple bottom line the business runs on, and the card on the table sets it out in three words: beer, people, planet.

The brewery’s own explanation fills that in. Brew beer that is balanced and flavourful. Run an apprenticeship programme for people traditionally excluded from the mainstream economy. Take one hundred percent of the electricity from wind power. It is also a certified B Corporation, which is a third party standard rather than a self declaration.

The line Harry Hayman kept coming back to was on a second card near the door, and it is the whole argument compressed. It tells the customer that ordering a beer funds a job training opportunity for hard workers who, in the brewery’s own words, are “overcoming housing insecurity or a history with the justice system”.

That is not a values statement. It is a description of what a transaction does.

The apprenticeship, which is the actual product

The programme behind that sentence is specific enough to check. In 2024 the brewery launched a sixteen week, fully paid apprenticeship for people who are justice impacted or housing insecure, covering on the job training and leadership development. CBS Philadelphia covered it when it launched, and KYW has reported on how central hiring people leaving prison is to the way the business runs.

The City of Philadelphia’s own fair chance hiring spotlight names the brewery as one of fifteen local employers recognised in 2026 for creating quality jobs. The founder has also talked through the model publicly on WHYY, which matters because a claim this specific invites checking and the business keeps inviting it.

Sixteen weeks, paid, with a job at the end for the people who want one. That is a number, a duration and an outcome, and all three can be verified. Most social impact language in hospitality survives precisely because none of those exist.

Why the model is harder than it sounds

A brewery is a demanding first job. There is heavy lifting, heat, chemicals, early starts, cleaning schedules that cannot slip, and a taproom full of customers on the other side of the wall. Training somebody with no brewing background takes staff time that a thin margin business does not obviously have.

Doing it for people who have been out of the workforce, or who are managing housing instability while they work, adds a layer that most employers avoid by writing a hiring policy that quietly excludes them. That exclusion is usually not stated. It shows up as a background check requirement, an address field, a gap in a resume that goes unexplained.

The reason Harry Hayman pays attention to this particular business is that it inverts the usual sequence. Most companies decide what they do, become successful, and then attach a giving programme. Here the hiring is the operating model, and the beer is how it is funded. Take away the mission and there is no reason for the business to exist in this form.

The residency in the yard

The other name on the building is on a yellow banner across the patio rail: South Philly Barbacoa. A second sign at the door reads food, drinks, good vibes, with both logos under it.

That is a serious pairing. The banner carries the marks of the James Beard Foundation, Bon Appetit, an Eater award and Netflix’s Chef’s Table, and the menu credits chef Cristina Martinez, whose South Philly Barbacoa has been one of the most written about food stories in this city for a decade.

The menu is short and priced plainly. Tacos at seven dollars, three for twenty one: barbacoa of slow cooked lamb, tinga, carnitas, pancita, and a vegan option. Esquites and chips with guacamole at ten. Sweet tamales at seven. A happy hour combination of one taco, a pint and a mini guacamole for fifteen.

What arrived in the photographs is the evidence. Esquites served in a corn husk with lime. Guacamole with radish and pico. A taco under nopales and salsa verde. And a table of clay bowls holding rice, coriander, limes, nopales, and three salsas each with its own card, roja, verde and a spicy salsa macha labelled for peanuts, sesame and walnuts.

Somebody wrote allergen cards for a salsa table. That is the detail that tells you how the kitchen is run.

What the pairing is actually doing

A brewery built on fair chance hiring, hosting a residency by a chef whose entire public profile is built on the labour and dignity of undocumented and immigrant kitchen workers, is not an accident of scheduling. Two businesses with the same argument are sharing a building.

Neither of them is charity, and that is the point Harry Hayman makes most often. Both sell things people want at prices people pay. The mission is not funded by the goodwill of customers; it is funded by tacos and pints, which is the only funding model that survives a bad quarter.

He has a further reason for being in the room. He has been looking at Triple Bottom as a venue for the launch event for ExoneratedMovers.com, which puts the choice of building squarely in the same argument as the businesses inside it.

The part that decides whether any of it lasts

There is a version of this story that is too comfortable, and it is worth stepping around it.

A business built on hiring people the mainstream economy excludes is not automatically a good business, and being right about the mission does not exempt anybody from the arithmetic. Breweries have closed all over this country in the past few years. Taprooms carry rent, equipment debt, distribution costs and a customer base that can decide overnight to drink something else. A social mission does not lower any of those numbers. In several ways it raises them, because training somebody from scratch costs more than hiring somebody who already knows the job.

Which means the interesting question about a place like this is not whether the mission is admirable. It obviously is. The question is whether the business is durable enough to keep doing it in five years, and that is decided by ordinary commercial things: whether the beer is good, whether the room is busy on a Thursday, whether the food partner brings people through the door.

That last one is why the residency matters more than it looks. A brewery with a serious kitchen operation attached has a reason for people to come at dinner rather than only after work, and dinner covers are what carry a taproom through a quiet January.

Harry Hayman’s read is that the pairing is the strongest thing about the current setup, precisely because it is commercial rather than sentimental. Two businesses that each make the other one busier, both of which happen to be built on the same argument about who deserves a job.

The unglamorous ask

Nothing in this post requires anybody to feel anything. The taproom is open Wednesday to Sunday, happy hour runs Wednesday to Friday from four until six, and the tap list runs from a juicy pale ale called Good Attitude to a nitro Irish stout called Beginish.

Go and eat. Order the tacos and a pint. The apprenticeship is funded by that and not by admiration, and the card on the table exists to tell you so while you are deciding.