When Richard “Dick” Yuengling bought the former Stroh’s brewery in Tampa Bay in 1999, no one was talking about blueberry wheat beers or India pale ales.
The then-fast-growing Pennsylvania brewing company, D.G. Yuengling & Son, was ready to expand its footprint and start selling its signature lager in the Southeast. Fast forward to now, and Yuengling is still growing, but feeling the pinch as consumers’ palates have changed and more buy craft beers from independent breweries.
Yuengling is the largest brewer in Tampa Bay and the second largest in the state behind the Anheuser-Busch InBev plant in Jacksonville. It produces up to 1.5 million barrels in Tampa every year, about half of all the beer the company produces in a year from all three of its breweries — the two others being in Pennsylvania. Yuengling is the oldest operating brewery in the country and one of the largest American-owned ones.
But times are changing. Big beer companies that sell the traditional line-up of yellow, fizzy domestic drafts at sports games, in bars and in cans at gas stations pretty much worldwide, have seen sales slide as craft breweries grow larger in number and stronger in overall market share.
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