The popular Wilkes-Barre eatery has partnered with SBC for its first-ever house beer…
There are restaurants that pour beer, and then there are places that decide the beer should say something about who they are. Anthracite Cafe has chosen the second path.
This month, the Wilkes-Barre mainstay announced it will debut its first-ever house beer: Coal Cracker IPA, a New England–style hazy brewed in collaboration with Susquehanna Brewing Company. The first keg will be tapped on Friday, January 30, 2026, starting at 5:00 p.m., with a rollout that leaves little doubt about intent, dollar pints, full tables, and a room packed with regulars who want to say they were there when it started.
Coal Cracker IPA doesn’t ask to be overanalyzed. It clocks in at 6.8% ABV and leans into citrus, brewed with orange peel and orange juice and built on a hop bill of Simcoe and Azacca. It’s labeled plainly as a New England–style IPA: hazy, aromatic, soft around the edges. This is a beer designed to be met halfway, one that invites another sip rather than demanding your full attention. No official tasting notes have been released, and that restraint feels deliberate. This is a beer meant to be discovered at the bar, not dissected before it ever hits the glass.
The choice of brewing partner matters. Since opening its doors in 2012, Susquehanna Brewing Company has become a fixture of northeastern Pennsylvania’s modern beer landscape—approachable, reliable, and widely poured without sacrificing local credibility. For Anthracite, the pairing makes sense. This is not a moonshot collaboration or a flex. It’s a practical partnership between two operations that understand their audience and don’t feel the need to chase novelty for its own sake.
More important than the spec sheet, though, is what this beer represents. Anthracite didn’t need a house IPA. Its draft list already rotates through familiar regional names and dependable crowd-pleasers. But creating a proprietary beer changes the relationship between the restaurant and what’s on tap. Coal Cracker IPA isn’t just another handle; it’s something you can only get in this room, at this bar, alongside this food. It turns the act of ordering a beer into a small declaration of place.
Anthracite has spent years positioning itself as more than a neighborhood dinner stop. It runs on rhythm and repetition: weekly programming, rotating weekend features, seasonal events that give people a reason to come back again and again. Bacon Week. Smokehouse Sundays. Seafood nights. Wing nights that turn into standing appointments. The menu evolves just enough to stay interesting, but the promise remains the same, show up, eat well, don’t overthink it.
A house beer fits neatly into that model. It’s familiar. It’s repeatable. And it gives Anthracite something of its own to pour alongside Friday and Saturday features like blackened ahi tuna, chicken Milanese finished with lemon butter, shrimp scampi over angel hair, or a Santa Fe chicken hoagie served with chili cheese fries. Coal Cracker IPA becomes part of the ecosystem, not a novelty act.
Wilkes-Barre’s beer story has always run on parallel tracks. There’s the legacy—names like Lion Brewery and Stegmaier that once defined how the city drank. And then there’s the modern craft era, locally anchored by Breaker Brewing Company, which helped reset expectations for what beer made here could be. Anthracite sits comfortably between those worlds. It isn’t a brewery, and it isn’t trading in nostalgia. It’s a food-forward destination where craft beer is part of the experience, not the headline.
Coal Cracker IPA strengthens that role. It gives Wilkes-Barre diners a venue-specific beer, something grounded, familiar, and rooted in place, without asking them to learn a new vocabulary or chase trends. Even the name does its work without winking: a straight-line nod to coal-region heritage that feels earned, not ironic.
For now, Coal Cracker IPA appears to be draft-only, despite promotional materials that depict cans, and there’s no confirmation yet on whether it’s intended as a permanent house pour or a limited run. Those details will sort themselves out in time. What’s already clear is the intention behind the beer. Anthracite didn’t set out to make the loudest IPA in the room. It set out to make one that belongs there.
The first keg of Coal Cracker IPA will be tapped at Anthracite Cafe, 804 Scott Street in Wilkes-Barre, on Friday, January 30, beginning at 5:00 p.m. Reservations are encouraged. The dollar-pint promotion will pull people through the door. The real test comes later, when the crowd thins, the posters come down, and the beer has to earn its place one pour at a time. If Anthracite’s track record is any indication, that’s exactly the kind of test this beer was built to pass.
