So many trends—from Starbucks coffee to grunge music to gourmet pizza with capers and duck sausage—started on the West Coast that it’s enough to give some East Coast residents an inferiority complex.
The ember of a dying East Coast brewery helped ignite a mighty conflagration out West.
Original Yuengling Brewery (image provided by Trevor Jochems)
Certainly, the West Coast has been ahead of the curve in craft brewing. Anchor’s Fritz Maytag rescued steam beer, that indigenous American specialty, from oblivion. Jack McAuliffe was a modern-day Moses, pointing others to the promised land but never entering it himself. (His New Albion Brewing Co., the first microbrewery, closed in 1982.) Sierra Nevada’s Paul Camusi and Ken Grossman proved that a small specialty brewery could turn out excellent beer consistently and be a financial success.
And yet it would be presumptuous to say that the West Coast revived the tradition of craft brewing in the U.S.
We on the East Coast never lost it.
Those ’70s Beers
Let’s time-travel back to the mid-1970s. America is largely a beer wasteland, with Miller Lite cresting on the success of its “Tastes great, less filling” tagline, and Coors—a clean-tasting but otherwise undistinguished Rocky Mountains brand—acquiring an almost cult status.
But there were oases for the serious beer drinker. I found one in Williams’ Café, a long-defunct watering hole in St. Clair, PA, just outside of Pottsville. The bar served two beers from the nearby Yuengling Brewery, Lord Chesterfield Ale and Yuengling Porter. You could get them separately or blended together as a half-and-half. The heady combination of the citrusy American hops and roasted malts was a wake-up call. Beer did not have to be a homogenized commodity like pork bellies and tomato paste.
Yuengling still makes the ale and porter. They’re hybrids, fermented with a lager yeast but at higher temperatures to bring out the fruity, ale-like characteristics. Yuengling has added an amber beer (Traditional Lager) to its product line as well as a pre-blended Black-and-Tan that utilizes Yuengling Premium rather ale.
The Institute for Brewing Studies does not officially recognize Yuengling as a “craft brewery” because it uses corn grits in its beer. And yet, Yuengling’s executive vice president David Casinelli reflects, “In many ways we are a craft brewery. The way our company is run is closer to small businesses than to the large national brewers. Until recently, we had guys racking kegs with rubber mallets.” Yuengling pumped out over 1.3 million barrels in 2003—it’s now the fifth largest brewery in the country—but still relies largely on word-of-mouth to sell beer.
In northeast Pennsylvania, the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre marketed its own Stegmaier Porter, sweeter than Yuengling’s, with a curious licorice-like taste. (It’s still available, reformulated as a true top-fermented ale.) The Naragansett Brewery in Cranston, RI also made a porter. In fact, the Northeast United States was one of a very few areas on the planet where you could order a glass of porter long after the style had disappeared in its native England.
C. Schmidt & Sons of Philadelphia, a sizable regional with a branch plant in Cleveland, made a Munich-style Dunkel called Prior Double Dark. In his 1978 The Great American Beer Book, a systematic ratings guide to over 550 beers then available in the U.S., James Robertson wrote, “Had there been no other ‘finds’ in all the beers sampled…, discovering Prior Double Dark would have been worth the effort.”
Schmidt’s closed in 1986, and the brewery site is now a vacant lot awaiting development. F.X. Matt, a family-owned brewery in Utica, NY, acquired the brand and recipe. “We made a draft-only version almost exclusively for McSorley’s Ale House in New York,” said company vice president Fred Matt. “We sold 400 kegs a month like clockwork.” Eventually, Heileman/Stroh underbid F.X. Matt on the account, and the production of Prior ceased. However, the brewery today makes a similar brew called Saranac Black Forest, which Matt feels has even more character.
“We used to do a whole specialty line for Utica Club; the Saranac thing is a return to our roots,” he added. During the 1970s, the brewery marketed a top-fermented cream ale and a malt liquor called Maximus Super, which, at 7.5% ABV, was the strongest lager beer then available in the U.S. “We went after a lot of the college markets; it did well for a while, then tailed off,” Matt recalled. “The nationals saw an opportunity and made a fortune going ethnic. We didn’t go that route.”
One of the East’s more obscure operations was Horlacher Brewing Co. in Allentown, PA. During the 1920s this little brewery allegedly produced bootleg beer for gangster Dutch Schultz. After Repeal, the company survived by doing private labels—scores, even hundreds of them—for supermarket chains, drug stores and liquor stores. Horlacher, however, produced a top-of-the-line, bock-style beer called Perfection, which was dry-hopped, fermented to an alcohol content of over 6% ABV and aged a remarkable (for that era) nine months.
Back in 1978, I stumbled across a musty case of the Perfection on the floor a Pennsylvania distributor. The brewery by that time was in its death throes, and the recipe had probably been compromised. But I still regret passing over the Perfection in favor of some commemorative Bicentennial cans holding ordinary beer.
