Pennsylvania Breweries

PENNSYLVANIA

BREWERIES

4TH EDITION

PENNSYLVANIA

BREWERIES

LEW BRYSON

4TH EDITION

STACKPOLE

BOOKS

Copyright ©1998, 2000, 2005, 2010 by Stackpole Books

First edition published 1998. Second edition 2000. Third edition 2005

Fourth edition 2010

Published by

STACKPOLE BOOKS

5067 Ritter Road

Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books.

The author and publisher encourage readers to visit the breweries and sample their beers and recommend that those who consume alcoholic beverages travel with a nondrinking driver.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8117-4232-0

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Tessa J. Sweigert

Labels and logos are used with permission of the breweries

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bryson, Lew.

Pennsylvania breweries / Lew Bryson. — 4th ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-3641-1 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-8117-3641-5 (pbk.)

1. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Pennsylvania—Guidebooks. 2. Microbreweries —Pennsylvania—Guidebooks. 3. Breweries—Pennsylvania—Guidebooks. I. Title.

TX950.57.P4B79 2010

647.95748—dc22

2010022661

For my father,

Lewis M. Bryson II

Always at my side

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Gritty Survivors: The Old Guard

Boston Beer Company

City Brewing Company

Straub Brewery

The Lion Brewery

D. G. Yuengling & Son

D. G. Yuengling & Son, Mill Creek Brewery

A Word About . . . Ales and Lagers

City of Brotherly Brewers: Philadelphia

Nodding Head Brewery and Restaurant

Yards Brewing Company

Philadelphia Brewing Company

Manayunk Brewing Company

Earth Bread + Brewery

Dock Street Brewery

Triumph Old City

A Word About . . . Micros, Brewpubs, and Craft Brewers

From Horse Country to the Delaware: Philadelphia Suburbs

McKenzie Brew House

Iron Hill Brewery, West Chester

Boxcar Brewing

Iron Hill Brewery, Media

Victory Brewing Company

McKenzie Brew House, Malvern

Sly Fox Brewhouse and Eatery

Iron Hill Brewery, Phoenixville

Sly Fox Brewery and Pub

Rock Bottom, King of Prussia

General Lafayette Inn

Iron Hill Brewery, North Wales

Crabby Larry’s Brewpub, Steak, & Crab House

GG Brewers

Porterhouse Restaurant and Brew Pub

Triumph Brewing Company, New Hope

A Word About . . . Pennsylvania Hotel Bars

A Patchwork of Farms: Pennsylvania Dutch Country

Lancaster Brewing Company and Walnut Street Grille

Iron Hill Brewery, Lancaster

Spring House Brewery

Bube’s Brewery

Swashbuckler Brewing Company

JoBoy’s Brew Pub

Stoudt’s Brewing Company

Union Barrel Works

Kutztown Tavern/Golden Avalanche Brewing Company

Bethlehem Brew Works

Allentown Brew Works

Weyerbacher Brewing Company

A Word About . . . Brewing Beer

Harrisburg and the Civil War: The Capital Area

Appalachian Brewing Company, Harrisburg

Troegs Brewing Company

Appalachian Brewing Company, Camp Hill

Market Cross Pub and Brewery

Appalachian Brewing Company, Gettysburg

Roy-Pitz Brewing

A Word About . . . Beer Traveling

Short, Steep, and Historically Significant: The Appalachian Ridge

Marzoni’s Brick Oven and Brewery

Otto’s Pub and Brewery

Gamble Mill Restaurant and Microbrewery

Elk Creek Café and Aleworks

Copper Kettle Brewing

Bullfrog Brewery

Bavarian Barbarian Brewing Company

Abbey Wright Brewing at the Valley Inn

Selin’s Grove Brewing Company

Old Forge Brewing Company

Berwick Brewing Company

Breaker Brewing Company

Barley Creek Brewing Company

ShawneeCraft Brewery

A Word About . . . Pennsylvania’s Regional Foods

Foliage, Fishing, and Wine: Northwest Corner

Erie Brewing Company

The Brewerie at Union Station

Sprague Farm and Brew Works

Voodoo Brewing Company

Blue Canoe Brewery

North Country Brewing Company

A Word About . . . Beer Festivals

(No Longer) Iron City: Pittsburgh

Pennsylvania Brewing Company

Church Brew Works

East End Brewing

Hofbräuhaus, Pittsburgh

Rock Bottom, Homestead

Rivertowne Pour House

Full Pint Brewing Company

Beerwebs

The Boneyard

Glossary

Index

FOREWORD

Beer is pleasure. Whether it be the simple refreshment of a cool, pre-Prohibition lager while the hot dogs are grilling or the soul-satisfying contemplation of an imperial stout on the first raw night of November, beer speaks eloquently to those of us who listen.

But beyond the pleasure of the liquid, the beer geeks in us can readily admit to another pleasure to be found in beer. That pleasure is options. Glorious multitudes of flavor and character options are to be found in craft beer today. While students at Doemens Institute and the Technical University of Munich at Weihenstephan, we never savored a quadruppel or a double IPA. They simply didn’t exist in the early nineties. Just as rauchbiers and weizenbocks did not exist in the United States in the seventies. What happened in between those decades?

What happened was that the intrepid thirst of a few avid beer lovers caused them to throw themselves into the craft of brewing and reinvigorate a moribund industry with flavor, style, and no shortage of guts. These pioneering craft brewers were beer lovers first, and then reluctant businessmen. Following their muse, they paved a golden road of pilsners and porters, stouts and saisons, as you cheered them on.

Your appreciation, as a consumer, was their reward. Your appreciation of these beers has sustained a fledgling industry and permitted families and businesses to flourish. Your appreciation took you to visit the sources of these beers, from across the nation to here in Pennsylvania.

In this book, Pennsylvania Breweries, Lew Bryson has captured the flavor, in every delicious detail, of what we as creators and consumers can be so proud of, the unabashed pleasure of the great beer we have to enjoy in Pennsylvania. You don’t have to travel to every brewery in the state—Lew’s already done that—but a great guide like this makes it easier to find the ones to put on your wish list.

So drink up this rich text and savor the success you’ve been an integral part of.

The pleasure is ours.

Bill Covaleski and Ron Barchet

Cofounders, Victory Brewing Company

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I have done from the beginning, I have some acknowledgments to make in this, the fourth edition of Pennsylvania Breweries . Chris Trogner of Tröegs Brewing Company mentioned my name to an editor friend of his and got this whole series started back in 1997. Kyle Weaver, who has been my editor at Stackpole Books for all the Breweries books I’ve done, has been a huge help, has been understanding with my problems, and has become, over the years, a good friend (and a more adventurous beer drinker!).

Beer is not just a drink, it’s the people you drink it with; that’s why I’ve always included good bars in the book. I’d like to thank the folks who make those bars great: the owners and managers, the bartenders, and the folks sitting on my side of the bar too. To the mid-Atlantic forum on BeerAdvocate and the readers of my blog, Seen Through a Glass, who had great advice on bars (and even bought me a beer or two): thanks, and keep those e-mails coming! A special thanks to Bil Corcoran at MyBeerBuzz for help with the Wyoming Valley bars. Bob Batz Jr. at the Post-Gazette graciously shared contacts and news on the Pittsburgh scene. Thanks to Rich Pawlak for his help with the regional foods section: the smoked duck at Dietrich’s is on me, brother.

My thanks to all the brewers of Pennsylvania, who have never let me down. You all came through in spades on this one. There have been many changes in the business since the first edition, and we all know each other better, even those who are new to this edition. We’ve seen Pennsylvania become home to the largest American-owned brewery (whether you count that as Yuengling or the Boston Beer brewery down the road), and we’ve got a couple tiny places brewing on a shoestring. I’m proud to call them all Pennsylvania breweries.

Special thanks once more to the people who have made me what I am. To my father, Lew, who couldn’t be with me this time but was only a cell phone call away with helpful advice. To my mother, Ruth, who gave me the tools. To my children, Thomas and Nora, who are a great reason to come back home when the journey’s done. And finally, always, to Cathy, who keeps me going when I wonder why I do this.

To all of you: Cheers!

INTRODUCTION

Welcome again to Pennsylvania and its breweries! You will find plenty of beer here these days, even though it’s a far cry from the glory days of beer making over a hundred years ago. Almost every Pennsylvania town had a brewery then; some, like Philadelphia and Lancaster, had ten or more. You’ll still find beautiful old bars in many small Pennsylvania towns, relics of the days when Pennsylvania’s German and East European laborers crowded into taprooms in search of cool lager to relieve the heat of a day’s hard work in forges and factories.

Pennsylvania still has five of its old breweries in one form or another, but the state has grown a new crop of breweries today—almost seventy, and more are on the way. They are called microbreweries or craft breweries, and they are notable not for their size, but for the broad variety of beer they make. This variety is not really a new thing; it is a return to the way beer used to be in America.

To understand where these new breweries came from, we need to take a look at our country’s history, during which American brewing went from a broad, vibrant industry to a fossilized oligopoly of brewers making one style of beer, take it or leave it. What happened?

The Rise and Fall of American Brewing

The history of the Europeans in America goes like much of human history since the discovery of alcohol. As soon as they got ashore, the early settlers started looking for something to ferment and distill: pumpkins, corn, pine needles—anything for a jolt. The most popular alcoholic drink in early America was cider, followed closely by rum brought in from the West Indies.

Americans drank a lot of these beverages and a lot of alcohol in general. Per capita annual consumption of alcohol was over ten gallons by the 1840s. That’s gallons of pure alcohol, not gallons of rum at 40 percent alcohol or cider at 7 percent. Americans drank pretty much all the time.

When Americans did drink beer, they mostly drank imported British ales. And when Americans began brewing, they mimicked the English by producing similar unfiltered ales.

Cider was still the most popular drink through Andrew Jackson’s presidency, but things changed rapidly in the 1840s. There were three complementary components to this change. In Philadelphia in 1840, a brewer named John Wagner is believed to have been the first to brew German-style lager beers in America. This refreshing beer became very popular with laborers because it could be drunk quickly to quench a thirst.

Paradoxically, the temperance movements that swept the nation in the 1840s accelerated the rise of lager beer. Temperance had strong effects on many suppliers, retailers, and drinkers. One of its major successes was wiping out America’s cider-producing orchards almost entirely. The 1840s saw fields of stumps on many farms; woodcut illustrations of the devastated orchards are a bemusing legacy. The demand for drink did not go away, of course, and lager brewers picked up the shifting market.

The third thing that drove lager’s popularity was the rise in immigration to America after the squashed German rebellions of 1848. Germans and other beer-drinking Europeans came to America by the thousands, and they wanted their beer. America was happy to supply it.

There were plenty of breweries in Pennsylvania, and some of the names survive in labels brewed by other brewers—Stegmaier, Schmidt’s, Gibbon’s—or merely in memory. You or your father (or mother) may remember Old Reading, Koehler of Erie, F&S out of Shamokin, Ortlieb’s from Philadelphia, Lancaster’s Rieker-Star, or DuBois Budweiser.

There were more than two thousand breweries in America at the turn of the century, mostly small local breweries producing almost every style of beer, although lager was a clear favorite. The temperance movements, however, had not gone away. The Great Killer of breweries in America was the little social experiment called Prohibition (1920–33). By 1939, when this fanaticism had run its course and the industry had briefly boomed and settled down, only about five hundred breweries remained.

Everyone knows that people didn’t stop drinking during Prohibition, but the quality of the beer they drank was dramatically affected. Some drank needle beer (near beer injected with alcohol) or low-grade homebrew, made with anything they could get their hands on. They used cake yeast and the malt syrup that brewers were making to survive. Other beer generally available during Prohibition was low-quality and relatively weak, made from cheap ingredients with large amounts of corn or rice for fermentation.

Illicit brewers used the high-gravity system, brewing very strong beer, then watering it down. This saved time and money, as did greatly shortened aging times. Federal enforcement agents knew that hops were a commodity really used only for brewing; brewers, therefore, lowered the amount of hops they used to avoid suspicion. For fourteen years, people drank literally anything that was called beer.

These changes brought about some long-term effects. The corn and rice and high-gravity brewing produced a distinctly lighter-bodied beer with an identifiable nonbarley taste. Low hopping rates made for a sweeter beer. Over Prohibition’s fourteen years, people got used to lighter lager beer. The process continued over the next three decades as big brewers came to dominate the market.

The rise of big breweries and the decline of small breweries can be tracked to several important developments. World War II brought a need to get lots of beer to troops abroad. Huge contracts went to the brewers that were big enough to fill them. Hops and malt for home-front brewing were considered largely nonessential. Improvements in packaging, such as crimp-top bottlecaps and cans, made buying beer for home consumption easier. Refrigerated transportation enabled brewers to ship beer long distances to reach more customers. These improvements required large capital investments possible only for successful, growing breweries.

Mass-market advertising during broadcast sporting events got the national breweries in front of everyone. The advertising further convinced Americans that light lagers were the only type of beer out there. Advertising was expensive but effective. The big breweries got bigger, and small ones went out of business.

Why did the rise of big national brewers necessarily mean that American beer would become all the same type of light lager? Simple reasons, really: Making it all the same is cheaper and easier. Success breeds imitation. Image is easier to advertise than flavor. A large national brand has to appeal to a broad audience of consumers.

This led to the situation in the 1970s in which one dominant style of beer was made by fewer than forty breweries. People who wanted something else had to seek out the increasingly rare exceptions made by smaller brewers (Stegmaier’s and Yuengling’s porters kept things going here in Pennsylvania) or buy pricey imports of unknown age and freshness. The varieties of beer styles were unknown to most Americans.

This is the real key to understanding the craft-brewing revolution. These beers are not better made than Budweiser; in fact, Budweiser is more consistent than many American craft-brewed beers. What craft-brewed beers offer is variety.

The American Brewing Revolution

How did microbreweries get started? Fritz Maytag bought the Anchor Brewery in San Francisco on a whim in the mid-1960s. He had heard they were going out of business and knew they brewed his favorite beer. Fritz was an heir to the Maytag appliance fortune and could afford to indulge his whims. But he got hooked on brewing, and Anchor led the return of beer variety in America. Fritz brewed Anchor’s trademark steam beer, an ale and lager hybrid; he brewed the mightily hoppy Liberty Ale; and he brewed the strong, malty barleywine he called Old Foghorn. Things were off and . . . well, things were off and walking in the United States.

Next came the microbreweries. Ambitious homebrewers, maverick megabrewers, and military personnel or businesspeople who had been to Europe and wanted to have the same kinds of beer they drank there saw a need for better beer. They started these small breweries, cobbling them together like Frankenstein’s monster from whatever pieces of equipment they could find. The beer was anything but uniform—sometimes excellent, sometimes awful—but even so, it found a receptive market.

The revolution started in the West and grew very slowly. New Albion, the first new brewery in America since World War II, opened in 1976 in Sonoma, California. Ten years later, Dock Street and Penn Brewing hired an existing brewery to brew their beers. The first new brick and mortar brewery in Pennsylvania, Stoudt’s, opened in 1987. Progress was gradual in Pennsylvania until 1995.

By the end of 1994, there were twelve breweries in Pennsylvania, including the six Old Guard regional breweries. By the time the champagne popped again at the end of 1995, there were twice that many. In the next two years, the number doubled again. Brewpubs popped up like mushrooms after the rain, microbreweries opened on a loan and a wish. It was an optimistic time, and it seemed like 40 percent growth would last forever.

Then the long-anticipated shakeout hit the industry, and the press has gleefully reported several times since then that microbrewing is dead. Independence and Red Bell crashed in spectacular fashion. Dock Street, the state’s oldest brewpub, was ignominiously run into the ground less than six months after changing hands. (The new Dock Street has plenty of DNA from the old one.)

Things looked bad for a few years, and the nationwide slump in the hospitality and travel industries after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, didn’t do breweries any favors either. In retrospect, though, craft breweries had already started to grow again at that time, and in the years since, they have outgrown every other sector in the beer market.

Craft breweries are part of the landscape now. Brewpubs are established in their communities and more are opening. Victory is booming and developing a national reputation, Tröegs can barely keep up with demand despite constant incremental expansion, and Boston Beer has moved to Pennsylvania and is brewing all their beer in-house for the first time, millions of barrels. Yuengling just keeps powering along.

Maybe more significantly, the process I call filling in the map continues. Just look at the arc between Wilkes-Barre and State College. Five years ago, only four breweries were there: Otto’s, Bullfrog, Selin’s Grove, and The Lion. Today there are eleven, and at least one more will open by the time this sees print. We still have large open spaces on the map, but of the ten biggest cities in the state, only Scranton and Reading are without a brewery (and they’ve had them—see the Boneyard—and still have exceptional beer bars).

People across the state are discovering the many different ways beer can taste. No one thinks all wine comes in gallon jugs anymore, and everyone knows there are more types than red and white. Beer is well on that same path. Craft beer has become normal.

How I Came to Love All Beer

A growing number of Pennsylvanians look for something a bit more stimulating than a mainstream mug o’ suds these days. But even when it comes to those standbys, we have always been remarkably loyal to our local brewers. These were lessons I learned early, in a beer-drinking career reflective of America’s beer revolution.

I had my first full beer as a freshman in college. When I was a kid, my father had often let me have sips of his beer with dinner. That was Duke Ale, from Duquesne Brewing of Pittsburgh, one of Pennsylvania’s many defunct breweries. But I’d never had a beer of my own until Tim Turecek handed me a Genesee Cream Ale in that 16-ounce, solidly brown and green returnable, dripping with condensation. I drank it, and it was good.

I drank a lot more of them over the next three years. Genny Cream, Prior’s’s Double Dark, Stroh’s, and Rolling Rock were my staples, along with Stegmaier, National Bohemian, and National Premium when the money was tight.

Then one night in my senior year at Franklin and Marshall College, I met my medieval history professor for drinks, a special treat for a few legal-age students. The bar was the Lauzus Hotel, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Run by old Wilhelm Lauzus, an ex–German Navy man, the bar carried more than 125 different beers in 1981, not too shabby at all in those days. I had no clue and grabbed my usual Stroh’s. My professor laughed and slapped it out of my hand. He pulled a German beer, an Altenmünster, out of the cooler and popped the swingtop. Try this, he said, and changed my life.

It was big, full in the mouth, and touched by a strange bitterness that I’d never tasted before. That bitterness made another sip the most natural thing in the world, like pepper on potatoes. I’ve been looking for beers outside the American mainstream ever since that night.

It’s increasingly easy to find that kind of beer in Pennsylvania, where our breweries are turning out everything from whopping Imperial stouts to crisp, bitter pilsners to rippingly hoppy India pale ales to bubbly, spicy hefeweizens. Is that all I drink, beers like that? Well, no. When I mow my lawn in hot, humid southeastern Pennsylvania summers, sometimes I want a cold glass of something dashingly refreshing and fizzy. Then I keep it local and reach for one of Pennsylvania’s regional brews, or one of our many microbrewed Bavarian-style wheat beers.

Drinking beer has changed a bit in Pennsylvania. There is a smoking ban in bars and restaurants now, which is a pleasant change for nonsmokers (you can taste your beer better, and you don’t stink when you get home). After seventy-five years, some supermarkets are finally allowed to sell six-packs, and there is movement in the state legislature to allow distributors to sell them as well, instead of the ridiculous case minimum sale law we are suffering under now.

As I finish up this fourth edition, a couple thoughts occur to me. First, craft-brewed and local beer is showing up all over the state these days. The number of beer specialty bars is growing fast, but what’s growing even faster is the corner bars that now have a tap of Victory HopDevil, or Penn Pilsner, or Stoudt’s Gold, or Samuel Adams. Craft beer isn’t out of the ordinary anymore. Another thing: I’m proud of how well Pennsylvania breweries have done. The largest American-owned brewery is here, Pennsylvania has the fifth-highest number of Great American Beer Festival medals (while having less than a third as many breweries as the most medaled state, California), and we have more pre-Prohibition breweries still open than any other state. Good job, Pennsylvania brewers and beer drinkers!

My family and I have enjoyed traveling to Pennsylvania’s breweries and sampling these beers at the source. My son took his first tour of the Yuengling brewery on his first birthday, and my daughter would rather have dinner at a brewpub than at McDonald’s. My wife loves a good beer as much as I do and is always happy to see the brim-full growlers I bring home from my research trips. Beer traveling is a lot of fun, and this book will serve as a guide for your travels in Pennsylvania. Hoist one for me!

How to Use This Book

This book is a compendium of information about Pennsylvania’s breweries. It also lists some of the interesting attractions and best bars in Pennsylvania. And it offers facts and opinions about brewing, brewing history in the United States and Pennsylvania, and beer-related subjects.

It does not present a comprehensive history of any brewery, nor does it try to rate every single beer produced by every single brewery. It is not a conglomeration of beer jargon—original gravities, International Bittering Unit levels, apparent attenuations, and so on. And it’s not about homebrewing. Other people have done a fine job on books like that, but it’s not what I wanted to do.

It is a travel guide about breweries and Pennsylvania, home to startling natural beauty and man-made wonders. Sharing information has been a central part of the success of the rise of microbreweries in the United States. I’ve been sharing what I know for more than twenty years, and this book and its companion volumes, New York Breweries, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware Breweries, and the latest, New Jersey Breweries, represent my latest efforts to spread the good word.

The book is organized in alternating parts. The meat of the book, the brewery information, is presented in eight sections: one more than the last edition, because we’ve added so many breweries. The first section begins with a general description of the larger, older breweries that make up the Old Guard. Each of the seven geographic sections—Philadelphia, Philadelphia Suburbs, Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Capital Area, Appalachian Ridge, Northwest Corner, and Pittsburgh—is prefaced with a description of the area for those unfamiliar with it. The A word about . . . sections are intended as instructional interludes on topics you may be curious about. There should be something there for almost everyone, whether novice, dabbler, or fanatic.

The history and character, highlights, my observations, and other information about the brewpub or brewery are presented in a narrative section. The annual capacity in barrels, as listed for each brewery, is a function of the fermenting-tank capacity and the average time to mature a beer. Lagers take longer, so on two identical systems with the same fermenter setup, an all-lager brewery would have significantly lower annual capacity than an all-ale brewery.

I have tried, in the past, to list every beer a brewery makes on a regular or seasonal basis, along with all the one-offs and specials. In this edition, I have for the most part given up. It’s for a happy reason: There are just so many of them! Victory, for example, now keeps twenty different beers on at their brewpub at all times; Tröegs’s ongoing Scratch series consists of more than twenty beers to date and has spawned a subseries of Splinter beers. The lists were getting crazy, so I cut back to year-rounds and seasonals (with the occasional exception, just because that’s the way craft brewing is). Similarly, we decided to drop the listings of beers that have won Great American Beer Festival medals, mainly because Pennsylvania breweries have won so many that it just got cluttered.

The other area beer sites I’ve listed for most breweries may include multitaps, historic bars, or restaurants with good beer selections. Whenever possible, I visited these bars and had at least one beer there. More of these descriptions than in previous editions are based on recommendations from brewers or beer geeks I know personally this time around: Beer bars in Pennsylvania have simply exploded. Another happy reason!

A couple notes on attractions: The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has a Web site with a lot of information about the state’s great parks, but the URLs are kind of unintuitive, so I didn’t list them in the book. You can easily navigate to individual parks from the DCNR main Web site: www.dcnr.state.pa.us.

Where hunting or fishing is mentioned, your best bet is to contact the Pennsylvania Game Commission (717-787-4250, www.pgc.state.pa.us) or Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (717-657-4518, www.fishandboat.com) for license and season information; the Fish and Boat Commission Web site also has great information on fish runs, stream conditions, and stocking.

Finally, I’ve been biking a lot more lately, and I’d like to recommend the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s Web site, www.TrailLink.com, for finding trails in the state. These include trails for walking, biking, ATVs, in-line skating, and horseback riding, all at fairly level grades, usually through great scenery. We’ve enjoyed them tremendously and support them.

Enjoy yourself!

Author’s Note: It just keeps happening! Two more Pennsylvania breweries were set to open just as we did final edits on this edition. I’ll tell you about them here, and you can find more at my Web site, www.lewbryson.com. The first is a production brewery, Prism Brewing Company (810-B2 Dickerson Road, North Wales, PA 19454; 888-424-9681, www.prismbeer.com). They were brewing their Bitto Honey IPA and Tea Party Pale Ale at the General Lafayette, but they now have their own 20-barrel DME system: Cheers! The second is the RiverHouse BrewPub (2890 Rt. 405, Milton, PA 17847; 570-523-1900, www.riverhousebrewpub.com), featuring beers by former Abbey Wright brewer Bart Rieppel. They’re right across the river from Lewisburg, smack-dab in the middle of one of the hottest brewing spots in Pennsylvania.

GRITTY SURVIVORS

The Old Guard

What a change since 2001! Pennsylvania still has more operating pre-1980s breweries than any other state—five, compared with two each for New York and Minnesota—but we lost two in nine years: Jones, where they brewed the Stoney’s brand, and Pittsburgh, which changed its name to that of its iconic Iron City brand just before the end in 2009. Latrobe narrowly dodged closing after its Belgian overlords InBev sold the Rolling Rock brand to Anheuser-Busch (and would get it back when they bought A-B itself a couple years later); Wisconsin-based City Brewing bought the brewery, bringing contracted brewing and jobs.

But the story of the rest of the survivors is a positive one. These brewers survived Prohibition, World War II, and three decades of brewery wars between 1950 and 1980. They made it by working with low debt, a long-tenure workforce that was as dedicated to the success of the brewery as the owners were, a fiercely loyal customer base, and sheer stubborn guts. They did it by adapting to a new beer market or sticking to their guns; they did it through changes in ownership or an amazing longevity of ownership. In short, they did what they had to do to stay open.

These survivors include Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery, and Straub, the self-styled highest brewery in the East. The Lion, in Wilkes-Barre, survived the last twenty years mainly by brewing malt soda for the Hispanic market. Latrobe hangs on by brewing whatever the customer needs, without a house brand at all. I’m also very pleased to welcome the big former Schaefer brewery outside of Allentown to this section of the book for the first time, under its new owners, the Boston Beer Company, brewers of the Samuel Adams beers.

These breweries are like a time capsule of American brewing, keeping alive elements of brewing history. Yuengling and The Lion were the last premicrobreweries in America to brew porter, a dark, rich brew with roots in London. Although porters are traditionally ales, these porters are lager-brewed, easier for these breweries to produce. The Lion even took a traditionalist step backward by once again brewing their porter as an ale; Yuengling, however, still brews their Pennsylvania porter as they have for years. Boston Beer uses traditional horizontal lagering tanks—high-maintenance, but they swear by the beer they produce.

While Boston brews with the full variety that defines craft beer and City brews whatever their customers want, Yuengling, The Lion, and Straub largely produce mainstream American lagers, brewed with lightening additions of corn. The beers are not of great interest to a beer geek, but they are all well made and consistent. When I’m in the mood for a sluicing, sloshing, lawn mower beer, I always buy local and support Pennsylvania brewers, and so should you!

You should also go visit them. Yuengling and Straub give two of the best industrial brewery tours in the country, taking you right down on the floor. Until recently, you could actually climb the ladders and look into Straub’s rare open lager fermenters, practically unheard of in these days of lawyerly precautions. The Lion does tours by appointment, with required hard hats; you know you’re going right into the heart of things when you don one of those! Even if you don’t go inside, simply viewing the architecture and the size of these buildings will give you a whole different angle on brewing.

Boston Beer Company

7880 Penn Drive, Breinigsville, PA 18031

www.samueladams.com

Let’s have a quick history lesson on this place, just to get up to where we would have been if the previous tenants had been willing to be in the earlier editions.

1972: Brooklyn-based F&M Schaefer opens their new, state-of-the-art brewery outside Allentown. The brewery is a proud statement, with tall windows on the brewhouse facing I-78, and Schaefer makes it theirs by bringing a large statue of Gambrinus, a legendary brewing figure, from their Albany brewery, a passing of the torch . . . or flagon.

1981: The name on the sign changes. Schaefer is bought by the Stroh Brewing Company of Detroit. Stroh’s, the fire-brewed beer, brings direct-fire copper kettles to the brewery, heated by huge gas burners right under the kettles. Gambrinus remains.

1992: I tour the brewery with sixteen friends; we are all awestruck by the size. We take a picture with Gambrinus. Meanwhile, Stroh is using the excess capacity of this brewery to do contract work: several malt liquors, some Yuengling Black & Tan at the height of that crazy demand, and some Samuel Adams beers (the Honey Porter was first brewed here).

1999: The name on the sign changes again. Stroh collapses under debt, and Pabst buys the brands and this brewery. It will be the last brewery Pabst owns—for now, at least—and beers brewed here will win more than twenty GABF medals in only three years. Gambrinus remains.

2001: Pabst closes the brewery, laying off four hundred workers. Diageo, a huge multinational drinks company, buys the facility but does not brew. They use the tanks and bottling lines to mix and package flavored malt beverages, like Smirnoff Ice. The sign is taken down. Gambrinus remains . . . but is clearly embarrassed.

2007: Boston Beer buys the brewery from Diageo and spends as much on renovations as it does on the actual purchase, including a new sign. Many of the Pabst and Stroh workers are rehired, most being quite proud of the fact. As Pabst sold the brewery to go all-contract, Boston Beer buys the brewery to bring all brewing in-house. Malt cooks again, hops hit hot wort, lagering tanks are cold and full, the bottling lines hum. Gambrinus remains . . . and he’s smiling.

Forgive me the history lesson, but you should have had that in the previous three editions of Pennsylvania Breweries. Pabst wouldn’t play ball and Diageo wasn’t brewing, and that really bugged me. But when Boston Beer founder Jim Koch announced the company was buying this brewery, I knew that this edition would finally be complete, because Jim definitely gets it.

Directions to Boston Beer Company

Jim Koch and his Samuel Adams Boston Lager are perfect inheritors for this, what Jim calls the last of the traditional breweries built in the U.S., because his beer, unlike other craft beers, has always been brewed in big breweries. When he decided, about twenty-five years ago, to follow in his family tradition—five generations before him were brewers—and make beer, he looked around and considered his options.

The trade-off was simple, he said. "I could build one of those early 1980s microbreweries with the money I had and sell beer on the local image, ‘Made in our tiny little brewery, isn’t it cute?’ Which is powerful stuff, no doubt. Or I could turn my back on that.

I thought about something my dad told me, Jim continued, which is, no matter how good the marketing is, someone’s got to drink the beer. You can’t put crappy beer out there and expect people to drink it. That led me to put the quality of the beer over the marketing appeal of having a brewery in Boston. Maybe it would have worked the other way. I don’t know, and I took a lot of heat for that decision.

But Koch contracted to make his beer in a variety of breweries (including Pittsburgh Brewing and the Lehigh Valley Stroh plant), and it grew quickly, more quickly than any other craft brand. That was the ‘magic’ of Samuel Adams: consistently high quality, he said. I had access to more brewing expertise; I had my dad and [brewing consultant] Joe Owades.

Did Koch decide to take brewing in-house because of a lack of contractors? No, there’s plenty of capacity, he said. It was a combination of the brewery being available, because Diageo was probably going to close it, and we had the money. The money—about $55 million to Diageo and about that much more in renovations—paled beside projections of building a comparable plant in Massachusetts: $400 million.

That’s what it would have cost because, Koch said, this was the brewery he wanted. Brewery technology shifted in the 1970s; brewers went from horizontal fermenters and aging tanks to tall cylindro-conical unitanks and switched to high-gravity brewing (see "A word about . . .