Crafty brew beats big boys in U.S. premium beer game
America's oldest brewery is tasting heady success, becoming the best-selling tipple of its kind in the country thanks to its distinctive flavour
As a teenager stacking barrels after school at his family's brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Richard "Dick" Yuengling, was encouraged by plant workers to avoid a career in the family business. America's taste for national brands such as Budweiser, Coors and Miller, they said, was going to put them all out of a job.
Undeterred, Yuengling bought D.G. Yuengling & Son from his father in 1985, and built it into the maker of the country's best-selling craft beer brand. As the company's value soared in the past decade amid a surge in demand for craft brews, Yuengling became a billionaire.
"We stay nuts and bolts - we make beer," Yuengling, 69, said in on the floor of his brewery in Pottsville, an old coal town 120 kilometres northeast of Philadelphia. "People pick up our products today because they are tasteful and they have character."
D.G. Yuengling & Son sold more than 2.5 million barrels of beer last year, a 15 per cent increase from 2010, according to the company. Its flagship offering, Yuengling Traditional Lager, a medium-body brew, was the best-selling super-premium beer and the fifteenth most-popular beer total in the US in 2011, according to industry researcher Beverage Information Group.
The lager and five other beer varietals helped Yuengling pass Boston Beer, the maker of the Sam Adams brands, as the largest US-owned beer maker by volume sold in 2011.
"Dick is an American original," said Jim Koch, chief executive of Boston Beer. "For years, people thought they were smarter than Dick and told him to do things differently. He never did, and for 27 years he has proved them wrong."