Free Republic

POTTSVILLE -- America's oldest brewery might soon be the largest American-owned brewer. Riding a 20-year wave of growth, D.G. Yuengling & Son Inc. is closing in on sales of 2 million barrels a year, bringing the 180-year-old company within a pint or two of surpassing the Boston Beer Co. and its Samuel Adams brands in sales. How did this happen? A big reason is that foreign-based companies have acquired such beer behemoths as Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. Another is the coal-region beer's rapid growth.

The D.G. Yuengling & Sons seal is printed on numerous items, from beer cans, bottles, shirts, hats and, believe it or not, patches worn by a certain Army National Guard unit on overseas missions. “It reminds of home, actually,” said Chief Warrant Officer Joseph T. Witmer of Etters, York County, who wears a patch that resembles the label on Yuengling Traditional Lager beer. Before mobilizing Thursday to prepare for a tour in Iraq, nine Army National Guard soldiers from the 2nd Battalion 104th Aviation, Fort Indiantown Gap, Annville, saluted Yuengling President Richard “Dick” Yuengling Jr. Tuesday morning at the brewery...

Leave it to the state where the word “lager” is synonymous with his flagship product to be Dick Yuengling Jr.’s model customers. Despite concerns in the beer industry that disappearing kegs are cutting into profits, the Yuengling Brewery owner said his kegs haven’t grown legs in the Keystone State. “In certain areas, it has been a problem. Pennsylvania hasn’t really been one of them,” he said. Still, he expected keg-deposit prices to rise to about $30 to counteract the rise in scrap prices. He didn’t, however, expect it to hurt his brewery’s keg sales, which he said constitute about 40...

POTTSVILLE, Pa. -- Dick Yuengling Jr., fifth-generation owner of the brewery that bears his name, called his employees together a few weeks before their labor contract was set to expire to talk about the future of the business. "Read between the lines," he told them at one point, according to government documents on the management-union feud that followed. Depending upon whom you ask, Mr. Yuengling's speech was either a pep talk to urge employees to work harder or an ultimatum to dump the Teamsters union, which is what they did. The union has been trying to strike back, urging a...

<p>Joshua Lipes, a 25-year-old paralegal who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., says that when he wears his tattered Yuengling shirt with an eagle perching on a barrel of beer, people stop him on the street to tell him they've been to Pennsylvania and tried the brew.</p>