A perfect gift for connoisseurs of the most popular drink enjoyed in American pubs, Red, White, and Brew is the ultimate beer run across the United States, during which Brian Yaeger visits fourteen breweries of various sizes and talks to founders, owners, brewmasters, consumers, and anyone else he meets on his odyssey and who enjoys the making, tasting, and appreciating of brews.
Red, White, and Brew pursues the roots of brewers who brought their craft with them from their homeland and investigates how the tradition is faring today and where it may head in the future. Covering everything from fifth-generation family-run brewing companies to first-wave microbreweries, this book is a travelogue, guide, and genealogical study of beer families and homebrewers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It is filled with eclectic characters and shrewd businesspeople who populate an industry as old as the New World, and who produce liquid philanthropy, one keg at a time.
A perfect gift for connoisseurs of the most popular drink enjoyed in American pubs, Red, White, and Brew is the ultimate beer run across the United States, during which Brian Yaeger visits fourteen breweries of various sizes and talks to founders, owners, brewmasters, consumers, and anyone else he meets on his odyssey and who enjoys the making, tasting, and appreciating of brews.
Red, White, and Brew pursues the roots of brewers who brought their craft with them from their homeland and investigates how the tradition is faring today and where it may head in the future. Covering everything from fifth-generation family-run brewing companies to first-wave microbreweries, this book is a travelogue, guide, and genealogical study of beer families and homebrewers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It is filled with eclectic characters and shrewd businesspeople who populate an industry as old as the New World, and who produce liquid philanthropy, one keg at a time.
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Overview
A perfect gift for connoisseurs of the most popular drink enjoyed in American pubs, Red, White, and Brew is the ultimate beer run across the United States, during which Brian Yaeger visits fourteen breweries of various sizes and talks to founders, owners, brewmasters, consumers, and anyone else he meets on his odyssey and who enjoys the making, tasting, and appreciating of brews.
Red, White, and Brew pursues the roots of brewers who brought their craft with them from their homeland and investigates how the tradition is faring today and where it may head in the future. Covering everything from fifth-generation family-run brewing companies to first-wave microbreweries, this book is a travelogue, guide, and genealogical study of beer families and homebrewers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It is filled with eclectic characters and shrewd businesspeople who populate an industry as old as the New World, and who produce liquid philanthropy, one keg at a time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429953177 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2008 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
BRIAN YAEGER earned a Master in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California with a thesis on beer. He holds a double bachelor's degree in Religious Studies and Russian from the University of California at Santa Barbara, a college renowned for its beer consumption. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Brian Yaeger earned a Master in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California with a thesis on beer. He holds a double bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and Russian from the University of California at Santa Barbara, a college renowned for its beer consumption. He is the author of Red, White, and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Read an Excerpt
Red, White, and Brew
An American Beer Odyssey
By Brian Yaeger
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2008 Brian YaegerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5317-7
CHAPTER 1
THE BEER STARTS HERE
D. G. Yuengling&Son Brewing in Pottsville, PA
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
— Charles Darwin
Some people inherit a ring or come into fine china bequeathed over generations. Not Dick Yuengling Jr. His family heirloom is a compound of buildings. Most people lock their birthrights away in safety-deposit boxes or on the top shelf of a cabinet. Dick Jr.'s legacy is beer.
The family jewel handed down over five generations is nestled in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Appalachian coal-mining territory. D. G. Yuengling&Son, established in 1829, is the oldest operating brewery in America.
There's one thing about being descended from a lineage of brewers or brewery owners. Unless your name is Busch or Coors, you're not coming into dynastic wealth. When I scheduled a meeting with Dick, he arranged it for 8 a.m. I arrived at the large, ivied brick building on the corner of Mahantango and Fifth streets, where I heard the playful shrieks of Dick's one-year-old grandson, Nolan, but I didn't see him. Nor did I see Dick. That's because he was nowhere around. Or should I say, he was everywhere. The receptionist called over to every department of the brewery because starting first thing in the morning, Dick is apt to be in all places at once. No mere figurehead, he is a hands-on leader who is just as likely to be working with a brewer on the bottling line as riding a forklift in the warehouse. Soon enough, he showed up in his office and asked me to join him at a rickety wooden table.
Dick lit the first of several cigarettes, his gray eyes made bluer by his silver hair and white, extra large YUENGLING LAGER polo shirt tucked into blue jeans. He was born in 1943, 114 years after the company's founding.
Ever since emigrating from the German village of Aldingen in 1823, David Gottlieb Jüngling (he changed the spelling shortly after arriving in America) has had a branch of the family tree rooted in Pottsville. All four of Dick's daughters — Jen, Debbie, Wendy, and Sheryl — work for him, and none of his six grandkids are even approaching the legal drinking age. Except for Wendy, the whole clan lives in Pottsville. If there's one thing I gleaned from Dick and can postulate about the fruitful ancestors before him, it's that the brewery was always their first baby.
Dick started working here at age fifteen. "It was a family business, that's all," said Dick. "I grew up in a family business and I obtained a strong feeling for the company."
Business. Company. Family owned and operated. These are the points he reiterated to me as we sat beneath portraits of successive generations of Yuenglings: D.G., his son Frederick, grandson Frank, great-grandsons Richard Sr. and F. Dohrman, and one of Richard Jr., too. Dick helms a family business first and a brewery second. He's a businessman before he's a beer man. He's not without charm, but his fixation is entirely on producing a quality product and keeping his distributors busy rather than being a beer ambassador. "My dad went to BAA [Brewers Association of America] meetings. I went when I first bought the company in 1985, but haven't gone in a while. I'm just too busy."
"Yeah, you were ostensibly missing from the Great American Beer Festival. I was hoping to meet you there in Denver or maybe one of your daughters," I said.
"I don't have the time to get involved. A lot of small brewers do that and it's good. I'm wrong in not doing it. The girls are all busy, too. We run a lean operation."
His focus on being professional more than personable is encoded in his DNA. The nature of the beer business means always having to navigate rough waters. It's not an industry you can coast through, and there is no rest, no autopilot.
"You gotta be careful how you manage your company," he said with a blend of objectivity and experience. "It's great to grow, but you gotta be cautious how you do it."
Clearly he's doing something right. His vigilant management has grown the company into the sixth-largest brewing concern in the country and second-largest independent. He began working here summers throughout high school and college, so I wondered how it felt being groomed for this role.
Exhaling a cloud of smoke, he said surprisingly, "No, there was pressure put on me to leave because my dad and uncle never felt there would be an opportunity for me to take over the company. They didn't think we'd survive, quite honestly."
"Why is that?" I asked, seeing as the company was clearly no fly-by-night operation, and teetering on the brink of extinction seemed incomprehensible.
Short of spinning a grandfatherly tale, he succinctly and squarely put the blame on two factors: television and interstates. "It all started in the early fifties when Budweiser and Ballantine were on television," he began. "People started drinking brands that they saw advertised on TV. Pabst sponsored the Friday-night fights. All these national and large regional breweries were taking all the small brewers' business."
Additionally, those companies could more easily distribute their product in refrigerated trucks to every nook, where previously those crannies were the domain of local brewers. In 1956 when President Eisenhower's Public Works Project created the interstate highway system, mass-produced beers swamped markets both big and small.
Funny how Yuengling is still in business but Ballantine isn't. I clearly recall the airwaves being inundated with slogans and mascots: "Tastes great, less filling." "No slowing down with the Silver Bullet tonight." And that bull terrier Spuds MacKenzie doing the conga with hot mamas fueled by Bud Light. Even my dad, a child of the fifties, still chants, "Whatchya gonna have? Pabst Blue Ribbon." Moreover, neither I nor anyone else can sing you a Yuengling jingle, and that's just the way Big Beer wants it.
In 1973, heeding his dad's and uncle's advice, Dick quit.
He bought himself a beer distributorship and earned a living moving other people's beers. Once, he met with Pete Coors as a colleague, not a competitor. He left his dad and uncle at the brewery high-and-seventy-thousand-barrels-short-of-dry. That's when Yuengling's stumbled upon a slogan that couldn't be bought on Madison Avenue and triggered its comeback: "America's Oldest Brewery."
AMERICA'S THEN-NEWEST BREWERY
What qualifies as America's "first" brewery is partially debatable. Heck, even the Mayflower docked ahead of schedule on a chilly day in 1620 because the Pilgrims ran out of beer, and really, there's no point in settling a new world if there's no brew. My guess is that the first three structures they built were a church, an outhouse, and a brewery, but not necessarily in that order. Whatever they built no longer exists, which is why, as far as road trips go, Plymouth Rock is considered a most disappointing landmark.
A couple of centuries later, when Germans began outpacing Dutch as immigrants, young David G. Jüngling looked around his family's Eagle Brewery and saw his father, Peter, and David's four older brothers. That essentially meant that David had fifth crack at taking over the family business or making a decent living there (his four sisters would have been even lower on the totem pole), so he sailed to New York. From there, he struck out for the boomtown of Pottsville, where anthracite coal had been discovered. What with the industrial revolution and all, everyone knew that if you were into smelting iron, you wanted anthracite. In Schuylkill County, Pottsville boomers mined tons and tons of coal. Demand fueled the creation of the Schuylkill Canal, completed in 1828, the year before our son of a brewer set up shop. It transported "King Coal" to Philadelphia until the more highly developed, farther-reaching railroads took over, giving future Monopoly fans the Reading Railroad.
Coal flowed down the canal to Philadelphia. D.G. used it to float barley and other supplies up to Pottsville. While there is a current debate about questionable promotional tactics of mass-market beer aimed at minors, D.G. made no qualms about his craft being targeted to miners.
Obviously not everyone in town worked the mines. I saw a late-nineteenth-century photo showing dozens of men working at the Yuengling brewery; it is a case study in mustaches.
D. G. Yuengling initially established his own Eagle Brewery. One statistic I'll never find is how many breweries have caught ablaze, but I do know that fires seem to be about as common at breweries as big, bad wolves at pigs' houses. Sure enough, two years later, the Eagle Brewery burned down.
Relocated a few blocks up the hill, D.G.'s rebuilt dream has remained in the same spot since 1831. One of the attractive features of the mountain setting was that miners could easily tunnel beneath the brewery. By the late 1800s, breweries helped pioneer modern refrigeration, but until such time, the tunnels were used to store the brews — Yuengling's (now called Premium), Porter, and Lord Chesterfield Ale — chilled to a constant fiftyish degrees. The tunnels, now obsolete, are no more than ten feet high.
As D.G. saw his business and his fortune grow, so, too, did his family. As I sat with his great-great-grandson in his very same office, Dick talked about how D.G.'s first wife passed away without bearing any children, but his second wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to five boys and seven girls. His eldest son, D.G. Jr., moved down to Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War, where he opened the James River Steam Brewery, only to have it washed away within a dozen years when the James flooded. If you're willing to get your boots muddy, you can still see its ruins.
D.G. Jr. opened another brewery in modern-day Harlem. There's an old photograph of beer wagons at 128th St. and Amsterdam Ave., where a new snapshot would show cars outside a cold-storage warehouse. With Junior off doing his thing, D.G. Sr.'s son Frederick had come aboard in 1873, prompting the name change to D. G. Yuengling&Son. Other sons opened branches from Saratoga to British Columbia. I guess they did so for the same reason D.G. lit out for the Land of Opportunity: Firstborn gets first rights; everyone else fends for himself.
Brewing had grown into the nation's fifth-largest industry with over forty-one hundred breweries in operation. Even including brewpubs, that's still more than we have today. As another historical footnote from 1873, Anheuser-Busch began bottling for large-scale shipments, figuring the railroads could do for beer what they'd done for coal and other resources. The famous Clydesdales were being retired. Even if D.G. heard about it, it probably didn't worry him. How could a giant brewery all the way in St. Louis possibly affect a father-son operation in Pottsville?
In 1877, forty-eight years after establishing the Eagle/Yuengling brewery, the founder passed away. In moving to America, David established roots for his company and his family. Not only is it the oldest brewery, it's one the country's oldest family businesses. When Frederick died in 1899, his only son Frank, at age twenty-one, took over as the third successive generation.
Dick lamented that the company's history was never thoroughly documented. Books weren't saved and for the most part, artifacts were haphazardly strewn about. As if to prove his point, he opened a couple of drawers in the table where we sat and black and white photos came popping out, like playing 52-pickup with the family history. He pulled out a picture at random and showed it to me. "It's a depot from the 1870s or 1880s and what you did was take your beer maybe ten miles away on a wagon, threw ice in it, and serviced the taverns from there. It was all draught beer in those days. As time went on, we just got bigger and bigger. My grandfather added more buildings and the company grew. There's something here from every generation and we're still using it."
Dick's grandpa Frank holds the record for being on the brewery's clock the longest. As the brewery entered the twentieth century, everything was falling into place. Frank married a local girl named Augusta Roseberry, and they had their first of five children, Richard, in 1915. After Dick Sr. followed F. Dohrman, Frederick, David, and Augusta.
Since Pottsville's founding in 1806 with two hundred settlers, the population had inflated to thirty thousand. "The mines employed a lot of people and they were beer drinkers," Dick said. "At the end of the day, they'd buy a bucket of beer and take it home. Or they'd sit at the barroom and have a couple of beers." They didn't all drink Yuengling's, but choices were limited.
On Frank's clock, coal was no longer mined by hand but strip-mined by machines operated by only a few people. Pottsville's population began to decline and, along with it, the local audience, which today stands closer to sixteen thousand.
Though every brewer, on a certain level, had to be wary of the other guy, they were all simultaneously felled by the one guy they or their forefathers had all moved to America for and were loyal to: Uncle Sam.
Temperance societies were nothing new, but by the turn of the century, they were on a tear. Several states and territories had gone dry, at least legislatively. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany. Capitalizing on anti-German sentiment resulting from World War I (though beer was hardly just the realm of the Germans), the Anti-Saloon League, buoyed mostly by women and churches, led the charge for national prohibition. Two years later when Congress sent such a bill to Wilson, he vetoed it. Checks and balances being what they are, Congress overrode his veto, thus signing into law the Volstead Act, which, in tandem with the misguided Eighteenth Amendment, turned America dry.
Prohibition spelled ruin for thousands of breweries. Those tunnels beneath D. G. Yuengling&Son were sealed up, never to store Yuengling Premium again.
FROM NEAR BEER TO NEARLY CLOSED
Starting in January 1920, Frank did what most brewing companies did to survive — he made near beer. During the next fourteen years, he kept the brewing line going by producing three nonalcoholic drinks: Yuengling's Special, Por-Tor, and Juvo. The o at the end was a popular marketing tool applied to the era's brews. Anheuser-Busch made one called Bevo; there was Pablo by Pabst, Schlitz's Famo, Stroh's Lux-O, and Miller's Vivo. A number of them, including Juvo, touted their healthiness as a liquid cereal. In 1929, Yuengling's centennial, there wasn't a drop of proper beer to be drunk.
Frank had a dairy constructed opposite the brewery, became the president of a local bank, and even opened up a dance hall. "He wasn't solely dependent on the income from the brewery," Dick said as he clicked open his Zippo and lit up another cigarette. He leaned back in his creaky chair and slowly sprayed smoke up to the ceiling fan, awhirl as the day grew warmer. "Consequently, he kind of let the thing go."
Yet on April 7, 1933, a truck carrying Yuengling Winner Beer appeared at the White House. FDR had asked Congress to finagle the Volstead Act, which set the limit for nonintoxicating beverages at 0.5% alcohol, to allow for beer to pack 3.2% alcohol. In the brewhouse a mural depicts a gentleman in high spirits holding a refreshing glass of beer in one hand and a bottle of Winner in the other. By June, Yuengling was one of thirty-one breweries back in action. By the following year? Upward of seven hundred. "The noble experiment" finally ended in December as the Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition. As a historical footnote, it is the only amendment to be ratified not by state legislatures, but by state conventions, thus allowing we, the people to speak louder than legislators.
The revitalization of the industry was ephemeral. The prevailing corporate culture in America voraciously cannibalized smaller, independent competitors via mergers and acquisitions, which permeated the brewing industry. Diminishing resources available to brewers during World War II exacerbated matters for the survivors. Dick Sr. served as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps and returned to find that the number of brewing concerns had dwindled to around four hundred, which, fortunately, still included his family's.
Despite Frank's stern reputation, Dick described him as someone who made sure his many grandkids got equal attention. Dick started working at the brewery shortly before his grandfather died in 1963, at which point his dad and uncle Dohrman bought it. Regarding Frank, Dick said, "He didn't want to put the money into it. I go through that now. I don't feel it's a wise investment, and apparently he didn't either. He didn't think it was going to last."
Today it has become a standard, almost necessary, business practice to take out a loan, but family businesses running a tight ship such as Yuengling's preferred to carry no debt. Frank's banking career clearly reiterated for him that it's better to be owed than to owe.
"So they bought the brewery from your grandpa?" I asked, curious as to whether money exchanged hands when it remained in the family or if it's just a matter of handing over the keys.
"Yeah, just like I bought it from my dad and bought Patty's share," Dick said, referring to his sister, who is married and lives near San Diego. "They had worked here like I did. My dad took care of the sales and my uncle was involved more in production, in the packaging end of the business. And I got my start in the bottle shop. We'd get returnable bottles back here and run them all for days."
Dick is aware of how much things have changed both in the industry and at his brewery just in the past couple of decades compared to the over-175-year history of the company.
That mentality of doing things as they'd been done in the past made Dick Sr. and Dohrman fight Dick Jr.'s ideas to modernize the operation. Not only were the national beers cutting into Yuengling's sales, but the high expense of doing everything by hand, from stocking the warehouse to loading the delivery trucks, was cutting into their profits. A decade of locking horns with his father and uncle, combined with reading the writing on the wall, caused Dick Jr. to walk away.
REIUVO
During Dick's twelve-year hiatus as an employee and a son, Yuengling&Son struggled, but never flatlined. As America celebrated its bicentennial, people began looking around for landmarks in its relatively short history. In 1976, D. G. Yuengling&Son entered the Pennsylvania Inventory of Historical Places. Dick returned in 1985 when company representatives approached him and broke the news that Dick Sr. suffered from Alzheimer's and couldn't continue, which is when Dick Jr. decided to buy it. The following year, the brewery made it into the National Register as well.
"How'd you weather it all?" I asked, believing there might have been some secret. "Fires and floods are one thing. Few others endured Prohibition and industry consolidation. But someone has to be the oldest. Why are you the one?"
"I never realized the marketing power behind America's Oldest Brewery.' We always had good products, but in 1984-85, it was like a beer renaissance."
A slogan or trademark alone would hardly have done the trick of staving off bankruptcy, fatigue, or cannibalism. The real saving grace came when Dick repositioned the Yuengling brand. It used to be stocked on the bottom shelf with the "price" or "economy" brands to compete with the megabrands. That doesn't seem fitting for a beer with a bigger flavor profile. He also introduced new styles such as lager and light. All of a sudden, Yuengling's was a "premium domestic," selling for a few bucks over those mainstream ones instead of cheaper.
If California beers such as Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale could do it, and yuppies drank expensive, imported beer (when they weren't drinking Evian or Perrier), why not the finest local brew? It worked like a charm.
Alas, no sooner had Dick returned than his cousins shut down the dairy across the street. Dick's uncle Fred operated it after Prohibition, but the children weren't that interested in keeping it going. The three-story, weathered brick building has sat vacant for two decades. When I later corresponded with Dick's daughter Wendy, she recalled, "There was a little parlor within walking distance from our house growing up where you could make your own sundaes. And we always had Butter Brickle in the house because that was my dad's favorite." Strolling through Pottsville later that day, I could still see an advertisement for YUENGLING'S ICE CREAM in fading paint high atop a brick building.
By 1991, Dick was scrambling to meet demand. He quadrupled production, but that still wasn't enough. It was an excellent predicament. Dick and his wife, a retired teacher, had recently divorced, and the girls were living with her. Dick took his four daughters on vacation to Florida for a powwow.
Most kids know what it's like to have a parent ask what careers they're thinking about and have a few suggestions nudged their way, but this was way different.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Red, White, and Brew by Brian Yaeger. Copyright © 2008 Brian Yaeger. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
The Beer Starts Here - D.G. Yuengling&Son in Pottsville, PA
New Brew for New England - D.L. Geary Brewing in Boston, MA
Outside the Eccentric Cafe - Bell's Brewing in Kalamazoo, MI
A Long Line of Leinies -- Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing in Chippewa Falls, WI
Beer Free in the Free State -- Free State Brewing in Lawrence, KS
Brew Like the Wind - New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins, CO
National Parks and Regional Beers -- Grand Teton Brewing in Victor, ID
A Rosey Climate -- Widmer Bros. Brewing in Portland, OR
Maytag Repair Man -- Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, CA
A Beer with Local Characters - Electric Brewing in Bisbee, AZ
Something Special in Shiner -- Spoeztl Brewing in Shiner, TX
Blowin' Dixie -- Dixie Brewing in New Orleans, LA
West Meets Yeast -- Alltech's Lexington Brewing in Lexington, KY
Every Dogfish Has His Day -- Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, DE