Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

1/29/2009
Yuengling tapping Super Bowl crowds in Florida
By Teresa Lindeman

TAMPA, Fla. -- At the Yuengling brewery in this Super Bowl city, the staff was really hoping for a Steelers-Eagles matchup.

"It would have been awesome," said brewmaster John Houseman, as he stood by the bar inside the brewery's small tour center. Really, he repeated, "It would have been awesome."

Yuengling is a family-owned brewery based in the northeastern Pennsylvania community of Pottsville, and its beer is distributed in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The previous time Tampa hosted the big game, in 2001, the rivals were the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants. Yuengling had only expanded into the former Stroh's plant in Tampa a couple of years before, but it had lots of fans in the two teams' home markets.

The result was Yuengling got to be a part of the party. Fans attending the Super Bowl from sites north found out the brewery offered tours -- and two free beers -- and turned out in droves. "This place was swamped," said Houseman.

The 180-year-old beer company, dwarfed in size by the industry's huge players but staking a claim to the title of America's oldest brewery, has raised its profile in the nation's southeastern corner a bit since then.

Beer made in the 80-employee plant is now sold in Florida and five nearby states, including both Carolinas, Alabama and Tennessee. Yuengling was just licensed for distribution in Georgia a few months ago.

The Tampa plant has a capacity of 1.5 million barrels annually and last year produced about 750,000 barrels, said Houseman. The goal this year is to get to 1 million barrels, about half the total company-wide goal of 2 million barrels.

The Pottsville side of the company is also looking to expand distribution, possibly into West Virginia. Yuengling currently can be found in 12 states, mainly along the East Coast. It's not in states farther west such as, say, Arizona.

If there are to be tourists swinging through the facility this week, they may come from groups such as the one from a local retirement home that showed up yesterday. The staff is hoping some Steelers fans also find the plant, which isn't far from Busch Gardens.

Only one such fan seemed to be part of yesterday's beer experience. Ron Woods, who lives near York and belongs to a Baltimore-area Steelers fan club, had come to the area to watch his 13-year-old granddaughter's basketball game. That, he said, was a little more important than the other game in town, although he was proudly wearing a Steelers shirt.

Those who take the tour -- it's a weekday-only offering that's not just available Super Bowl week -- will get a bit of an education into the making of a product almost as closely tied to Steelers football games as hot sausage and Terrible Towels.

Yuengling's distributors take care of getting the product into retail stores and fans' glasses, but Houseman guessed that beer sales nationally, from all brewers, climb significantly around the Super Bowl. "Whatever it is on the normal Sunday, it's got to be double that," he said.

Tour guide Elizabeth Maroney took visitors yesterday for a stroll past massive, silver brew kettles filled with a boiling, bubbling brown liquid known as wort. The liquid isn't called beer until it reaches the fermentation tank in the next step.

The recipes for the various Yuengling brews involve barley, hops, time to ferment, time to rest and chemical analysis along the way. The tour went through a lab run by Randy Petty, a quality assurance technician, who constantly runs tests on the liquid as it moves through the process.

Petty also has the task that many beer drinkers may covet: He must taste the beer all along the route. That's a tougher assignment than it may seem.

Years ago, he passed a screening test in which he had to do things such as identify the Old Milwaukee vs. the two Miller samples or the Budweiser samples. Out of 20 sets of beers, he had to get 18 right or else forget any plans to earn his beer-tasting qualifications.

There was more training, more sampling and more studying before he became an expert who can tell by tasting the flavor and eyeballing the clarity of a glass of amber beer that it's good enough for a sober client to proudly hold up for a toast at the bar.

After the lab, the tour wound past windows with a view toward noisy, fast-moving machines that can fill 900 cans a minute or 650 bottles a minute. Foam pools at various spots as glasses are bottled, capped, labeled and packaged. At spots, the place smells like a bar where lots of beer has been poured.

Workers also fill 12,000 kegs a week, then store them in a room kept at 36 degrees. A forklift operator yesterday was wearing a fur-lined, ear-covering hat worthy of Pittsburgh in January.

Production runs about 54 percent bottles, 30 percent kegs and 16 percent cans, Houseman said.

Back at the tour center, visitors who can prove they are old enough quaff their second beer. There are five choices, including lager, porter and lager light, all served in 12-ounce plastic cups.

The gift shop is not licensed to sell alcohol. Anyone who wants to take home a souvenir must choose from less potent stuff such as a $14.99 T-shirt or perhaps a $240 neon sign for the basement bar.

< Back to Archive