Source: St. Petersburg Times, Fla.,
04/06/1999
Author(s): By Kyle Parks, St. Petersburg Times, Fla.
Apr. 6--TAMPA, Fla.--D.G. Yuengling & Son Inc.,
a fast-growing Pennsylvania brewer, plans to buy the shuttered Stroh plant in
Tampa so it can make and sell its Yuengling beer in Florida.
"We have agreed with Stroh on the price for the facility," said Dick Yuengling
Jr., president of the Pottsville, Pa., company. "Now it's a matter of finishing
paperwork and getting the licenses we need to sell beer in Florida."
He expects the deal to close by early next week and hopes to hire many of the
154 people put out of work when Stroh closed the N 30th Street facility in
January. Stroh closed the plant after it lost a contract with Pabst Brewing Co.,
but Yuengling said it won't take much work to get the facility back on line.
"The attraction to us is that it's a smaller brewery, with a capacity to make
about a million-and-a-half barrels" a year, Yuengling said. "We need more
capacity, but we don't want to go crazy with our growth. Most breweries you'd
look at these days are 5- or 6-million-barrel facilities."
Yuengling is the fifth generation to run the company, which started after his
great-great grandfather moved to Pennsylvania from Germany in 1828. Yuengling
bills the 170-year-old brewery as the oldest in America; it attracted about
50,000 visitors last year.
With sales thriving in its market area of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey
-- Yuengling has quadrupled production in nine years to 635,000 barrels a year
-- the company is building another plant near the original site. That facility
is set to open in 2001. The Tampa plant would also add to production and would
help the company grow geographically.
"We will grow our production carefully in Tampa," Yuengling said. "We will send
some of the beer back north, but also hope to sell a lot of it in Florida."
The company will face a challenge in the Florida market, already crowded with
the major brands and microbreweries like Ybor
City Brewing Co. of Tampa.
"Florida is a tough market," said Humberto Perez, president of Ybor City
Brewing. "Distribution is always an issue because the state is so big. And you
have to understand each part of the state, because each is so different with
different tastes."
Yuengling hopes to have the Tampa brewery running again by June and plans to
meet next week with officials from the Teamsters union, which represents Stroh's
former workers. They were making an average of about $14 an hour, and Yuengling
said that is in line with what he would pay.
Yuengling & Son Inc. had $65-million in revenues last year. It sells cans and
bottles at a mid-price level similar to
Anheuser-Busch Co.'s Michelob brand, which costs about $5 for a six-pack of
12-ounce bottles.
----- Visit http://www.sptimes.com ,
the World Wide Web site of the St. Petersburg
Times, at http://www.sptimes.com (c)
1999, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News