Still brewing after all these years (Yuengling Brewery)

The Yuengling Brewery wasn’t the first American brewery but it’s the longest surviving. Dominic Roskrow looks at its history

The history of American beer is a diverse and varied one, and it has taken a new wave of small brewers to remind us that right across the States there is life beyond Budweiser.

But for one Pennsylvanian brewery the link with the past has never been broken. During a 180 year period in which breweries have opened and closed across America, the Yuengling Brewery has continued to make beer independently. It has done so through tradition, innovation, determination and, during the period of Prohibition, with guile and cunning.

The history of beer in America stretches back as long as immigrants from the Olde World settled there. Early references to its production describe beer being made with corn in Virginia as early as 1587, and English beer was being imported from 1607. But it was not the English settlers that carried the American brewing industry forward. It is thought that the first proper brewery was established in what was then known as New Amsterdam and is now Manhattan by Adrian Block and Hans Christiensen, and they would be followed by an army of European immigrants who would do likewise.

It was a contingent from the four million strong German community that would provide the first great beer barons of the 19th century, and names such as Schlitz and Busch who would dominate. These entrepreneurs arrived as humble workers and committed themselves to hard graft and struggle. In the second half of the 19th century they would transform America’s beer industry into a world fo.....

To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue or subscribe to Beers of the World to have every issue delivered direct to your door.

By Dominic Roskrow

Section : Beer history

Page number : 46