Yuengling Brewery:
Mmmm… beeeeeer.

By Randy Garbin

So moans cartoon hero Homer Simpson and similar thirsty minions when considering a cold glass of that malt beverage as old as civilization. Beer. It’s a wonderful thing, and consumed in moderation, it’s actually good for you. Any brewer would have told you this long ago, but doctors have actually discovered the correlation between moderate beer (and wine) consumption and a lowered risk of heart disease. Yet, to those of us who have long enjoyed this historic and much-varied beverage, this finding simply gives us one more reason to love the stuff.

Like many others, my relationship with beer goes back to my teen years. As I came of age, the available beer selection provided a mere fraction of what’s available today, at least in terms of types if not brands. Even today, the big names of Budweiser and Miller still reign supreme, having stomped their long-time rivals such as Pabst, Schlitz, Rheingold, Knickerbocker, and others, but the still-recent development of the microbrewery continues to nip away at their heels. Ironically, there’s nothing new about microbreweries–before Prohibition, literally thousands of them existed in almost every significant city in the country. According to Steve Johnson in his book New England On Tap, this country reached its peak in 1872 with a total of 2,272 breweries. Beer history reveals hundreds of great regional brewers that, if they had survived Prohibition, barely lasted the generation after. From where we stand, the onset of the microbrewery and the brewpub mark one of the greatest trends of the latter half of this century.

This recent history of brewing closely parallels many 20th century industries, such as coffee, entertainment, automobiles, and restaurants. Before the Depression, there were many different competitors, many different varieties, but afterwards, we saw consolidation and homogenization. While a few regionals continued to offer ales, the general trend since 1840 has shown a movement towards lighter, clearer lagers served at near-freezing temperatures. In fact, by the early 1980s, if you drank a true ale, you most likely drank an import. Most Americans have been conditioned to want a frosty-cold glass of near-clear, practically flavorless lager.

With the advent of television, marketing became the watchword of the the beer industry, and the brewer that couldn’t spend large sums on advertising, especially television advertising, became just another can to collect. Today, Anheuser-Busch maintains its market dominance via its promotional juggernaut, not through any pursuit of brewing diversity or quality.

Up until the advent of the microbrew movement, the death of flavor in American beer appeared inevitable. Except to those who lived in northeast Pennsylvania.

Vitamin “Y”

Were it not for diners and their increasing rarity, I might never have taken the opportunity to pick up and drive all around the northeast looking for them. With so many in Pennsylvania and traveling so many miles there, I soon began to notice the prevalence of a beer called Yuengling and that it offered a porter, my favorite variety. That a substantial regional brewery even bottled a porter was unusual enough, but its obvious quality combined with its very low price induced a great deal of envy for my “friends in Pennsylvania.” As I became more familiar with the culture and history of brewing, I felt an even stronger draw for this brewery.

Those well-versed in beer history know the story of Yuengling: Oldest brewery in America; longest family-run company in America; and a coal-region brewery now popular in some of the most fashionable bars and taverns in Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey. But Yuengling lives up to the hype: It makes a top-quality product. As Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing strove to purge their brands of actual flavor, this little regional hummed along, not only bucking the trend, but setting a few of its own.

Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the home of Yuengling, has cut several facets of American history. A coal country commercial center, wealthy Philadelphians with coal mining interests once vacationed here. The degree of wealth is plainly evident in the city’s majestic architecture. Pottsville lays claim to a labor history milestone with the hanging in 1875 of the “Molly Maguires,” a secret terrorist organization that sought to exert control over the area’s many coal mines. And finally, the Garfield Diner served as the backdrop for a stump speech made by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960. Will Anderson published a famous photograph of that event in his book Mid-Atlantic Roadside Delights, showing Kennedy engulfed by a massive crowd in Pottsville’s Garfield Square.

While coal first put Pottsville on the map and politics gave it brief notoriety, it’s safe to say that beer helps to keep it there. The city struggles in typical fashion, having been bled dry by the advance of suburbia and the decline of the anthracite coal industry. A walk about town leaves a bittersweet impression. While much of the streetscape survives, what occupies it generates an economy at a mere fraction of what existed only 30 years ago.

But imagine what Pottsville must have looked like in 1829 to a 21-year-old German immigrant and butcher’s son named David Yuengling. The discovery of coal had occurred only 23 years before, and the town had just started to carve out a small niche of civilization from what was then the “wild, wild west.” We may never know why this young man with no apparent brewing experience decided to build a brewery here. At the time, most of America drank ales, but David stuck to his roots and produced one of the country’s first true lagers. Probably mindful of the growing numbers of fellow German immigrants that followed him into the region’s hills and valleys, David was able to brew using readily available cold spring water as well as the local mining labor pool to dig cooling tunnels under his brewery. Bucking the national trend proved to be a good idea. And although his first plant burned down two years later, young David managed to quickly build a second facility on the same site one finds it on today.

As the coal industry prospered, so did Pottsville and Yuengling. The family’s prosperity lead to some interesting expansions and investments. By the turn of the century, the company actually had five breweries, the Pottsville one, three in New York, and one in British Columbia(!). Frederick, David’s son, also helped to build Manhattan’s famed Roseland Ballroom. When Prohibition hit, however, the family consolidated all its operations in Pottsville. To cope with the sober new reality, the company turned to producing a non-alcoholic near-beer, and also constructed a dairy directly across the street. Though the dairy closed in 1985, the building still stands today and features an outstanding relief of the Yuengling name at its cornice.

Over the years, the original brewery has undergone a number of expansions, down as well as up and out. Before the advent of refrigeration, Yuengling cooled its beer in the maze of tunnels dug into the mountain. These fabled tunnels are all still there, but off-limits to the public. The most notable expansion came in 1992 when current owner Richard Yuengling Jr. nearly doubled capacity with the addition of new brewing tanks and by shoe-horning in a new building to house them right behind the old building. Today, Yuengling boasts an annual brewing capacity of nearly 500,000 barrels, and while this growth seems impressive, the total capacity about equals what Anheuser-Busch spills in one year.

If the mere flavor of the beer doesn’t fully emphasize the importance of tradition to this company, then a visit to the main office might finally drive it home. The Yuengling home office greets you like a scene from a period movie depicting the days of unfettered American capitalism. The quality of workmanship in the wood-paneled decor, the ornate vintage reverse painted-glass advertising sign, and the oil portraits of the five Yuenglings to run the operation between 1829 and 1985, leave no doubt how sincerely this company values its heritage. Always present in the air, one smells the aroma of beer brewing–hops, and malting and its fermentation.

Our visit to the Yuengling plant revealed a series of delights, starting with the man himself: Dick Yuengling. Emerging from his office dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans, he looked more properly dressed for eight hours of heavy lifting on the loading dock than for pulling the levers of an entire operation. Silver-haired, hardy, and fit, Dick Yuengling’s completely approachable demeanor nicely tucks into the growing legend of his company. “I’m a worker,” he readily admits, explaining his qualifications for the position. “But I know when to bring in people to do the things I don’t know how to do.”

Except for a brief stint running his own beer distributorship from 1974 to 1985, the brewery has been his whole life. “In 1973, I got disgusted and left. I wanted to modernize. I wanted to do some different things. I wanted to spend my father’s money. Anybody can do that. But when it’s your own money, you think twice before you do things. So, I bought a local beer distributorship and ran that for 11 years. In 1985, I bought the company from my father and have been here ever since.”

Struggling at first to fill his father’s shoes, Dick’s well-honed instincts for the business helped him decide on a plan for growth. “I always felt that as the oldest brewery in the United States, we had something nobody else had. Our products were always good. Our packaging had a lot to be desired. But our location, only an hour from Philly, two and a half hours from New York City, and two hours from Baltimore, put us in the heart of the biggest beer market in America. Nobody else looked at it that way. When my dad got sick he had to retire and that’s when I bought it. I floundered for a couple of years, but I brought in someone with marketing experience,” and the company executed a program to revamp the brand’s image.

In retrospect, his timing was perfect. By 1985, the craft-beer movement was beginning to hit its stride, and the market for beer with actual flavor began to explode. Suddenly, ponying up to the bar and simply asking for “a beer” was akin to going to the diner and asking for “some food.” Now calling the shots (and spending his own money), Dick embarked on a campaign to update the image of the company and to fully capitalize on a heritage other small brewers could only fabricate. Hiring David Casinelli as the company’s new marketing director, Yuengling promptly redesigned its labels and other packaging to reflect a more traditional image. If ever the term “back to the future” applied to anything, it applied to this story, because rather than seeing the company’s age as an obstacle to progress, Dick Yuengling recognized it as his company’s greatest asset.

Now 55 years old, and grooming his two daughters to continue the tradition, he’s all but assured his place in beer history as the man who saved the family business.

Dick Yuengling’s talk about history and heritage certainly makes excellent copy, but is it sincere? Absolutely, according to Will Anderson, who actually began his publishing career with a series of nine books on beer and its history, and who also coined the phrase “breweriana.” Will confirms that much like his father before him, Dick Yuengling Jr. understands and appreciates what his family built on that mountain. “I knew Dick, Senior,” Will told me, “and after an extensive tour of the plant, we’d sit in the Rathskeller for hours drinking ale and talking about beer. That was the just the kind of person he was. He was a regular guy–a real nice guy.”

Will also confirms my assessment of the product. As a resident of Maine, he lives even further from a ready supply, but he speaks of it reverently.

Porter’s progress

The story of Yuengling very closely parallels that of most other small breweries over the past 100 years, with one very important distinction: Most of those breweries are gone. According to Will, coal country boasted 10 to 12 brands before Prohibition, with Yuengling as almost the sole survivor. While the company struggled in the post-war period simply to survive, the tenacity of third-generation Frank Yuengling and his sons, Richard Sr. and F. Dormann allowed it to reach an impressive milestone in 1979: Its 150th anniversary. According to Dick Jr., the resulting publicity finally ended a long decline in production. But as he also points out, the brewery was producing mostly “price” or discount beers that appealed mainly to a shrinking blue-collar market.

In the early ’90s, after developing new packaging, while putting in place a new marketing plan that recognized the value of the company’s history, and lining up a new distributor, this sleepy regional brewery embarked on an expansion that almost doubled their production. With the large Boston and Philadelphia beer market in their sights, Yuengling’s campaign to elevate the brand past its low-budget coal-country image succeeded beyond all expectations.

“We pursued the New England states primarily because of the success of Samuel Adams. They were the original connoisseurs of draft beers in the New England market.” Yuengling figured correctly that if a company can find success using a fabricated history as a marketing campaign, a company with a real story in the business should do at least as well. “We changed to a wholesaler in Philadelphia who gave us some good attention and put money behind the brand–and [sales] exploded!.”

“But we’re small,” he explains. “We only had a capacity of 180,000 barrels ten years ago, and we couldn’t keep up with it. So we put a new building up, bought extra fermenting and storage tanks, and started to grow. We got our capacity up to about 260,000 barrels. We grew into that in a year! In 1998, we’re going to do almost half a million barrels. The problem is, we don’t want to lose our core market–eastern Pennsylvania.”

This devotion to consumers in Yuengling’s own backyard, those who kept the company going during the lean years, plus some distribution woes, forced a decision to retrench. Another brewer may have simply raised the price to control demand and raise margins, but this wasn’t an option for Yuengling. “Our program,” Dick insists, “is to make quality and make it at a reasonable price.” That’s no mere slogan. The local retailer sells a case of the porter for only $14 (we’re used to paying $24 and up for ales of similar quality). After all, as Dick pointed out, Yuengling commands 50% of the local market, and he didn’t want to alienate this following. “Our business increased beyond the capacity to service our customers, and I had wholesalers mad, retailers mad, and consumers mad. We’re small and we’re family-owned and people understand that, but at the same time if you’re a retailer and your customer walks out because they can’t find a case of our lager, you get mad. Then they get me on the phone–I’m very accessible here. I’m not August Busch!”

Residents of Eastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and Delaware live in Yuengling country. If you live in New England and upstate New York, then perhaps the “major announcement” coming in a few months that Dick hinted at in our discussion might bring good news. We’ve also read some reports that the company plans to build a new brewery in our region, with a yearly capacity of up to one million barrels.

The Tour

With micro-brews all the rage, the brewery tour has become a commonplace attraction. We’ve yet to find a brewpub that doesn’t have a tour scheduled at some point during the week. Yuengling jumped on that bandwagon years ago, and now Dick boasts that his tour attracts over 50,000 people a year, making it Pottsville’s number one tourist attraction, a factor that mitigates the brewery’s relationship with its neighbors.

“We’re an annoyance to the town in that we have this brewery in the middle of a neighborhood, and we have tractor-trailers all over the place. But,” he emphasizes, “I think the city is proud of us; that we’re a bright spot in this little coal region town.” Dick stresses that he’s as proud of the popularity of his tour as he is of the beer. “It’s not all about money. Certainly you’re here to succeed in business, but I’m happy that the people think enough to tour the plant.”

Still a resident himself, Dick speaks of Pottsville almost wistfully. “We’re a struggling small community. We were formerly an elite small town in the hey-day of coal. We had a great downtown. On Saturday afternoon, it was the place to be. We had theaters, stores–everyone was busy. But suburbia took over, and we got clobbered like everyone else.”

Dick doesn’t claim to have any easy solutions to the problem. “We’re fighting to bring our downtown area back. I’m not directly involved with it, but the city has a base in us to get people into the community.”

If Pottsville manages to find the right formula for revival, then both the city and the brewery stand to benefit. Though Dick describes the beer business as “nerve-wracking,” I asked him if there were advantages to this over, say, making brake pads for General Motors. His sense of responsibility to the family name clearly registers. “I have to look at the four generations that came before me and remember what they gave me the opportunity to do, because they stuck with it. They kept it alive for me. I want to keep it going as a family business. We’re not trying to be the biggest brewery in the United States or even compete with Anheuser-Busch. We’re a neat little company. That’s all I want it to be.”