Thursday, October 27, 2016

Do you really think Dick Yuengling is the only brewery owner supporting Donald Trump?

Photo credit: What to drink if you're giving up Yuengling.

If you didn't already grasp the political inclinations of brewery owner Dick Yuengling, then I'm sorry. You should consider looking out the window every now and then.

Only recently I wrote about a similar case regionally; because the tweet in question disappeared so quickly, it seemed like small beer, and there wasn't any good reason to shift into outrage. Still, it helps to be realistic, and to understand that the producers of your favorite beer don't necessarily agree with your politics.


AFTER THE FIRE: New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming occupation isn't alleviating my "craft" beer Twitter depression.

... Since the dawn of the brewing revolution, it has been my operating assumption that most of us are leftists. In the 90s, I simply can’t recall meeting very many fascists in the business.

However, as someone told me back in kindergarten, never assume; you make an ass out of "u" and me. Probably my sampling was always too small, and in terms of demographics, it’s unlikely that "craft" beer would be any different in attitudinal composition than the nation as a whole.


Does this mean there should be boycotts falling like rain on a landscape already denuded of common sense? I don't know. America is Jonestown Redux at the present time. Ask me again on November 9, and I might conjure an answer.

Insofar as Yuengling interests me at all, it's because the brewery is family-owned, and far less owing to the flagship beer itself, which strikes me as purely average, though it sometimes is useful during road trips when few better options are available.

Can this election cycle please be over?


Dick Yuengling Supports Trump, and Beer Fans Aren’t Happy About It, by Claire Sasko (Philadelphia Magazine)

After Eric Trump visited America’s oldest brewery, beer fans found out that Yuengling’s owner supports Donald Trump. Now there’s a Yuengling boycott brewing.

First, Eric Trump held a short press conference at the Pottsville company, during which he attempted to convert Yuengling-drinkers to Trump-lovers. According to the Reading Eagle, Trump called the country’s oldest brewery “an amazing American success story” and likened it to many businesses that he said would have the opportunity to thrive under his father, President Trump.

And then 73-year-old company-owner Richard “Dick” Yuengling Jr. told Trump that “our guys are behind your father,” according to the newspaper. “We need him in there.”

It’s not really a surprising response from Dick Yuengling, a known conservative who’s been notoriously tough on union employees and was a delegate for George W. Bush at the 2000 Republican National Convention. In fact, the beer was reportedly banned from the inauguration of Democratic governor Tom Wolf.


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