Old School Pennsylvania Beers

[G.M. Gillman]

I was in the Reading area visiting friends and apart from two visits to brewpubs (mentioned below), decided for the fun of it to drink only old school beers, meaning, beer made by the 4 remaining pre-craft breweries in PA: Straub (St. Mary's), Yuengling (Pottsville), The Lion (Wilkes-Barre), and the former Latrobe plant which makes Iron City now and other beers under contract or so I understand.

Yuengling Porter was excellent, with a classic porter palate, certainly light-bodied but tasty and in the classic porter zone. I only had the regular lager (not the Premium) once, in the bottle, and it seemed so-so. Lord Chesterfield ale was an eye opener though, I had it from a can thus there was zero light-struck effect and it was very good, almost craft-like. A good example of an early 1900's carbonated ale, i.e., when ale was changing over here to a more lager-like palate yet still retaining estery and other characteristics of English ale.

Straub was very nice too, certainly you could taste adjunct but as in the Chesterfield it didn't hit me in that dry starchy way like most big-selling mass-produced beers do.

Due to the still-local nature of the beer market there, I couldn't find Stegmaier Porter which the guys I was with all spoke well of. I did find Stegmaier Gold and found it hard to drink, however it sells for almost half of what Lord Chesterfield and the Yuengling Porter sell for, so you get what you pay for. I wanted to try Lionshead from Wilkes Barre but didn't have the chance. My friends were kind of lukewarm on that one, so perhaps I didn't miss a regional jewel.

On the craft side, we visited Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg. A wheat wine was stunningly good, but their regular pale ale (not the IPA) was kind of husky-tasting and seemed slightly off to me in fact, but was still a nice place with good food. One of the best APAs I had in a long time was served at the brewpub in Lancaster City just across from the market there, called Taproom brewpub. It had a really fine fruity hop taste, I think the signature was from Amarillo. Clean and rich, the real deal. Apart from this though, I stuck to the old school just to try and have a sense of the pre-craft era in a place where numerous regionals survived.

If you stuck to the best of what was offered it was good beer drinking, nothing earth-shaking but satisfying and very suitable for a BBQ and conversation. Which leads me to Molson Canadian. I brought down a dozen because there was no craft beer at Pearson Duty Free and I figured if I'm going old school, I might as well show my friends our old school. They all liked it a lot. They get Labatt Blue in the local market and Molson Golden but not Canadian plus the fact of its coming direct from Toronto interested them. Everyone liked it, younger people with good experience in the craft area and older guys who weren't into the craft scene. I didn't try it and in my memory of it, the taste is less assertive than that of Lord Chesterfield, but there you go. Maybe it's the lure of the different but one person said that he knew Labatt Blue well and felt the Canadian was much better.

Incidentally one of my friends said that into the 1980's a brewery in Reading made a Sunshine lager that was very popular. I think I see now that Troeg probably is giving a nod to that history, at least in the name, with its (very worthy) Sunshine Pils.

Next time I'll focus purely on the craft side but it was fun to "go back to 1980" and far from a dull experience although low points there were.

Gary