POTTSVILLE, Pa. — One day in 1980, John Callahan was driving carefully down the steep Mahantongo Street in this Schuylkill County town when he spied a person standing outside the D.G. Yuengling and Sons Brewery.
Mr. Callahan, who had lost his job four days earlier, was desperate to find employment, so he slowed down and on a whim shouted out his car window at the guy: “Hey, buddy. Any jobs?”
“I really didn’t expect him to even answer me,” said Mr. Callahan, as he gave me a tour of the deep cellar of the ancient brewery. “To my astonishment, he waved me over and said, ‘Come on in.’ His name was Ray Norbert. He was the brew master at the time, and he hired me that day.”
Mr. Callahan started scrubbing the floors and cleaning the massive tanks. Today, 43 years later, he is the plant manager, overseeing America’s oldest brewery, which has been in operation and owned by the same family since Andrew Jackson was in his first term as president.
The story of how D.G. Yuengling and Sons has been able to stay in the same family for over 194 years is rightfully told through the lives and experiences of its employees. For Mr. Callahan, it’s become a family affair: His wife works in marketing; his son is now a brewer; and his daughters worked here during college.
Ask any employee here, and they’ll tell you that Yuengling’s longevity — now in the sixth generation of family members — is a testament to love of community, country and sense of place. It is testifies to a spirit of resilience that began in earnest in 1920 with the advent of Prohibition, which killed thousands of small businesses across the country, and likely would have doomed Yuengling if the family had not diversified.
Yuengling Ice Cream helped keep the doors open during those 13 dry years.
That resilience was tested even further with the growth of national beer brands after World War II. Before Prohibition, nearly everyone bought their beer from local breweries like Yuengling, but Prohibition had killed many of those operations. After the war, the advantage went to the bigger firms of Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz, whose market share went from 19% right after the war to 75% in the 1980s.
Mr. Callahan said by 1985 he wouldn’t have been surprised if Yuengling closed its doors: “We were really just trying to survive then.”
At the time, Dick Yuengling Sr. was running the business and struggled with the challenge of building market share. Enter his son, Dick Jr., who returned to the business in 1985 after working elsewhere for several years.
Dick Jr. admits he and his father clashed over expansion and cutting deals with distributors, but the risks he took became the brewery’s salvation, and by 1987, they had opened a second plant a mile down the road. And he developed a Yuengling Lager recipe that was an instant classic with beer drinkers regionally.
“When I bought the brewery in 1985 from my dad, Budweiser was starting to make big inroads, and so was Miller Lite and Miller High Life, so both their brands were hot in the eastern Pennsylvania market,” said Mr. Yuengling.
“We needed something besides just a premium beer, so I come up with this amber-colored, tasteful, not too overwhelming … and the brew master developed it. By God, the rest is history,” he said.
He is sitting in his daughter Wendy Yuengling’s office: All four of his daughters are part of the sixth generation running the business. Filled with energy, he is still engaged in the operations — and takes time for fans of the product. As he steps out of the gift shop to go across the street to the brewery, a young boy asks to shake his hand and have his photo taken with him; the boy and his father leave with a photo and a signed baseball from Mr. Yuengling.
Yuengling credits the late Pittsburgh beer distributor Frank Fuhrer Jr. for encouraging him to expand during the lean 1980s and 1990s: “When I initially balked at investing in making more beer when I wasn’t selling enough of what I already had, well, he told me, ‘If you are made of what I think you are made of, then you will find a way to do it.’”
“That was when I bought the brewery in Tampa, because Strohs was closing all their breweries,” and the expansion of Yuengling began to unfold.
Frank Fuhrer III, who has taken over running Fuhrer Wholesale, one of the largest beer distributorships in the nation, said he remembers the moment his father gave Mr. Yuengling that advice, “He saw the potential; he was a very wise man that way,” Mr. Fuhrer said. Today, Yuengling is one of their top three sellers, and you can get a Yuengling in more than half of America’s 50 states.
Still, Mr. Yuengling said, the challenge with the big guys is in getting shelf space in grocery chains: “Our competition is the big guy in St. Louis. They don’t like us. They realize our potential, because our beers are good.”
The company does not weigh in on politics. Yes, Barack Obama enjoyed their lager while watching an NCAA Tournament game in Blair County in 2008, and Eric Trump toured the brewery in 2016, but the company has shrewdly kept its powder dry in its advertising. Yuengling’s social media is cheeky but positive — almost exclusively pro-beer, pro-American, focusing on what they do best: making very good beer in America.
On the brewery tour, you get to walk through the labyrinth of caves that cooled the beer in the days before refrigeration. You get to see the brewers in action, marvel at the massive tanks filled with Lord Chesterfield, and — if you’re lucky — meet their resident mechanic, who also has worked here for 43 years.
Mr. Callahan says there are 34 jobs here in the old brewery, plus another 100 at the facility down the street, and a few hundred more at the expansion breweries. “We run very lean,” he said. “We don’t have extra people standing around; everybody does a job, cleans, and no one says, ‘It’s not my job.’”
As to what makes the place special, for Mr. Callahan, that answer is easy: “It’s not like we work for corporate America. You work for a family. I worked for Dick’s (Jr.) father for five years; he knew my family. When my dad died, Dick was the first guy across the street at the funeral.”
As if on cue, Wendy and her father are walking around the operations side of the plant, talking to the workers and to customers who just finished a tour and have their arms filled with limited-edition “Team Red, White & Blue” cans and swag, part of Yuengling’s year-round “Stars and Stripes” campaign that supports military veterans. Several customers say they had traveled from California and Colorado to do the tour.
Wendy Yuengling says she knows being the sixth generation running a business is extraordinary. So what does she think the future holds for the seventh generation? “We’re trying to expose them to the family business, but not push them into it — because we certainly weren’t. Our dad gave us a taste of what’s possible, and if that’s what we decided to do, the opportunity was there. We’re trying to follow that same approach.”
North Side native Salena Zito is a national political reporter for The Washington Examiner, a New York Post columnist and co-author of “The Great Revolt”: zito.salena@gmail.com.
First Published: June 18, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
