Yuengling

It’s good to be open to serendipity. This goes double when you’re someplace unfamiliar. We went to Florida for the usual reasons, of course—warm days, cool pools, tourist attractions, some new places to eat, essentially as a way to remove ourselves from the barnacles of day-to-day living for a while.

We didn’t go to be introduced to a beer from Pennsylvania, but it worked out that way. We drove a number of times along the main road next to the Best Western Busch Gardens, the unassuming but fairly busy north-south 30th Ave., and the very first time we noticed the Yuengling Brewery, a plain industrial facility set back from the road. A couple of large signs announced the name of the place, but it took a few drivebys to notice smaller signs that advertised brewery tours every weekday at 10 am and 1 pm.

Yuengling. I rolled that name around in my head for a few days. I thought it sounded familiar. I also thought it sounded like a cousin of Tsing Tsao, but I placed it on the wrong side of the Eurasian landmass, since it’s an Pennsylvania brew with roots in Germany (Tsing Tsao was also set up by Germans, as I recall), founded by a Herr Yuengling before the Civil War.

We’d had a long day visiting the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, so we opted for easy things on Friday: sleep late, a brewery tour at 1, lunch, and a late afternoon at Clearwater Beach. We arrived about 15 minutes before the tour, and in the combination factory office/waiting area/gift shop/bar, which also had old brewery and brewery worker photos arrayed on the walls, our guide offered us a beer before the tour began.

“That’s unusual,” I said. “Usually, you get your sample after the tour.”

“You can have one then as well,” she answered. She was a chipper middle-aged British woman who was clearly fond of her job. She explained at one point that she had married a man from Massachusetts whose job had taken them to Florida, but she never did say how she wound up at Yuengling. Still, she had a pleasant voice and knew a great deal about beer.

I had a black and tan, Yuriko tried the lager, and the kids got Sierra Mist. Not bad at all, but I’m no beer fanatic. I just enjoyed the novelty of drinking something I’d never really heard of before. The reason for that, it turns out, is that Yuengling is still an eastern U.S. beer—a regional in this era of nationals and microbrews. It has not (yet) even made it as far west as Illinois, but our guide did say that the brand is growing at a considerable clip.

We did the tour with about six other people. The brewery itself is a dowdy facility, its chipped steps and dim hallways dating back to the 1950s, when it was originally a Schlitz brewery. We got to see the beer taster’s lab (he wasn’t there), which reminded me of a high school chemistry lab, but I was distracted at that moment because Ann had a strong urge to take the taster’s pens and mark up his notes, which I had to prevent.

The brewery floor is visible from a set of windows one story up. Thousands of bottles were in motion, but, true to the state of the art, almost no people were visible. Laverne and Shirley would have to get jobs elsewhere these days, so automated has the process become, but that was even true in 1983 when I saw a Stroh’s brewery in Memphis. Six people ran the whole place.

Our guide also pointed out that there’s a machine to check each bottle to make sure it’s filled exactly to 12 oz. or 14 oz. or whatever it is supposed to be. Overfilling, at least according to Florida law, amounts to bootlegging, a legality that never would have occurred to me. “If it’s overfilled, we have to throw it away,” she said. “That’s a shame. No one can drink it. That’s what I consider alcohol abuse.”