Yuengling Brewery

This past weekend, McGee and I roadtripped up to the Yuengling (pronounced "Ying-Ling") Brewery!  It's about 1.5 hours away from our crappy apartment.  The Brewery was SO cool.  I've definitely never been in a brewery with anywhere near that much history (it IS America's Oldest Brewery, after all!).  It has been family owned and operated since it was established in 1829, and it is now owned by Dick Yuengling (the 5th generation to own it), and his three daughters all currently work in different sections of the brewery and are learning the ropes to eventually buy the brewery from their dad!

There were tons of cool stories, and unfortunately I can't remember a lot of them (I should've written them down right after - dang!!), but most of them were about what the brewery went through during Prohibition.  I remember that during Prohibition, Yuengling started up a dairy right across the street from the brewery, and that's where they were making a good amount of their money during that time (they made a lot of ice cream).  They were also still producing "near-beers" (0.5% alcohol) and their Porter, and their Porter was prescribed by doctors to aid anemia and it was also prescribed by doctors for women who were breastfeeding (yeah... weird...).  So, the tour guide said that during that time, women were breastfeeding their children for many years and there were a lot of people with anemia because they all wanted their prescriptions!!  People had to have their beer.  The tour guide also said that during Prohibition, a lot of people around the town would store Yuengling's beer for them (on the down-low of course... because it was quite illegal to have it!), including the Catholic church that is next to the brewery!  The Yuengling Dairy was also used to secretly store a lot of the beer.

One of the coolest things about the brewery is the underground caves that were hand-dug and used for fermentation and storage before there was refrigeration.  It took 10 years for these caves to be dug-out, and when you're walking through them you can see why!  It's nothing but rock!  I tried to take some pictures of the caves, but they turned out kind of blurry:

 A sign on the wall of one of the caves

Here are some copper sinks in the brewery

This is a cool stained glass ceiling in the brewing room!  Isn't it gorgeous?  

Gotta have hop storage.

And after the tour is over, they take you to a little bar area for some samples!  

Here's a picture of the Yuengling Dairy across the street:

And this is a picture of the outside of the brewery: