This brewery started operations when Andrew Jackson was in the White House. And I'll bet Old Hickory would have loved to take the tour.

D.G. Yuengling & Son is America's oldest brewery, and gives one of the best brewery tours you'll ever experience. There's no multimedia experience, no crazy goof in the taproom who'll tell you to go ahead have another whatthehell, and no overhead monorail gallery. That's the point: this is one of the last major brewery tours that takes you right down on the floor, where you could stick your arm in a machine and get mangled. It must give their lawyers fits.

Somehow, I don't think Dick Yuengling lets the lawyers bother him much. Dick fought this brewery back from a near-death experience in the 1980s. He worked a miracle with this tired old brewery in the 1990s; Yuengling's growth for that decade was over 400%. They will probably crack 1,000,000 barrels this year, an astonishing feat for a brewery that echoed and dripped in moldering quietude when I first toured it in 1986.

That was an amazing tour. I toured the brewery with two friends on a Friday, when the brewery normally closed for cleanup, which I now suspect was a euphemism for "not enough work." The vice-president of sales took us through, showing us everything, including the old lagering caves cut into the side of the hill that are no longer part of the tour. Then we met Dick Yuengling Sr. in the brewery taproom, where we downed quite a few Lord Chesterfield Ales and Yuengling Porters. If it hadn't been snowing like crazy, we may have stayed all afternoon; they were willing.

Things change. In 1986 I was a librarian who liked beer, and Yuengling was just another dying regional brewery that happened to make a few different beers. Fourteen years later I make my living writing about beer and spirits, and Yuengling is a miracle of revival, having purchased a 1.5 million barrel annual capacity brewery in Tampa from Stroh, and putting the finishing touches on a 1.5 million bbl. brewery about 1.5 miles from the original brewery. They put over 50,000 visitors through the tour on the old brewery every year.

Yes, some things do change, but the tour hasn't. I last took it in July, my 29th Yuengling tour. The giftshop has expanded, and now includes a small museum of old bottles and promotional items. There are some new framed pictures and a lot of framed newspaper stories about the brewery's growth. But once the tour starts down the steps from the giftshop, it's like all that growth and change never happened. Duck under this, climb these narrow stairs (there are a lot of stairs, and there are wet floors: shoe yourself accordingly), and the guides use no microphones and may be one of Dick's daughters.

You may see Dick himself. He's unimpressed with the whole celebrity thing, it's just business to him, and every time I've interviewed him he's been in flannel shirt and jeans, usually with his boots up on a clear space on his big old desk. We've seen him on the tour a couple times, usually in the bottle shop.

The tour will take you from the brewhouse (a beautiful old place, not frilly, but the functional curves are pleasing to the eye) by the multi-necked copper grant, up by the hopstore and through the machine shop, out past the government cellar where the tax is calculated, and through the bottleshop. That's the second-best part of the tour, all rattling conveyors and rumbling tunnel pasteurizer, spinning, hissing multi-head filler, and maybe the mad Goldbergian whirligig of the canning line (I've only ever seen it operating once).

Then it's down past the electrical room (where a girlie calendar used to hang... I guess some things have changed) and up to the best part of the tour: the taproom. It's not best because that's where you get your two free beers, though they are great--once we asked for porter and there was none, but the guide recalled that they were kegging porter at the time: we went downstairs with them and brought back a fresh-filled quarter of porter that was just fantastic. It's because of this history-filled old barroom, with its stone-flagged floor and walls covered with old letters to the brewery, old trophy fish, beautiful promotional artwork, and the ornately carved wooden flying eagle poised over your head.

That's where you can taste the beers. The big seller, Yuengling Lager, is a bit more beer than Bud, and the brewery's old mainstay, Premium, is a real mainstreamer. Yuengling Light is a surprisingly tasty light beer that has a lot of potential. Yuengling Porter is a delicious dark lager beer with a dash of roasted malt flavor. Lord Chesterfield Ale isn't really an ale, but it is a nicely hoppy lager that is my favorite of the line.

This is not Anheuser-Busch, 700 cans a minute, computerized controls and a tour that hardly even smells beer. It's not a microbrewery, hops everywhere and Gen-X attitude oozing from the walls. It's an old historic brick building, perched on the side of a steep hill in an old industrial town. This is the way things used to be all across the country, local breweries making local beer, hiring local people for good, blue-collar jobs. This is more than a brewery tour, it's a time machine.

One more tip: don't park in the lot across the street. It's for the church, not the brewery, and they do tow.




Recommended: Yes