Pure water pure beer's foundation

Demand overwhelmed pump house's capacity

Water used to brew Traditional Amber Lager pours into a brewery tank.

Water.

It's the most important ingredient in making Yuengling Traditional Amber Lager.

Ninety-six percent of Amber Lager -- all of Yuengling's beers, in fact -- consists of water right out of the tap, said Brewmaster N. Ray Norbert.

Some of the rain that ends up in Amber Lager is condensed from the Gulf of Mexico, then carried north by south or south-westerly winds, said David J. Nicosia, forecaster with the National Weather Service, State College.

Easterly winds also bring storms into Schuylkill County from the Atlantic, he said.

When rain falls, it runs down the Broad Mountain into the four Schuylkill Municipal Authority reservoirs: Wolf Creek, Eisenhuth, Pine Run and Kauffman.

In a filtration plant north of Saint Clair, chlorine is added to kill bacteria, said Authority General Manager David J. Holley.

Alum makes dirt and sand clump together, so it can be removed in the sand, gravel and anthracite filtration beds, before being piped to "America's Oldest Brewery" at Fifth and Mahantongo.

To start brewing, 160 31-gallon barrels worth -- or 4,960 gallons of water -- is run into a vat. Before corn grits and barley malt are added, Norbert lowers a pail, removes a sample and tests the water for acidity.

When the pH-level was 6.4, the water is perfect, Norbert said.

Another 170 barrels are added in the lauter tun, where the extract that becomes beer is removed from the grain.

The brewery does have a filtering system -- it uses sand, carbon and ultraviolet light -- installed within the past decade, but it's rarely used. It operates at a rate of 120-140 barrels an hour.

"There's nothing to filter out," said Richard G. Yuengling Jr., brewery president. "This area is noted for excellent water. The water we have in Schuylkill County is the best water available to brew beer with."

Before buying the filter, if water appeared murky Yuengling merely stopped brewing until it cleared. But that was before growing demand had the brewery running at capacity.

Filtered water is most often used during the stage called high-gravity brewing, where a high-strength brew is brought down to drinking level by added sterile, de-oxygenated water.

Filtered water is also kept as a reserve, Norbert said.

When David G. Yuengling founded the brewery 168 years ago across from the site of today's City Hall, it was perhaps just luck that the water he found was "soft," lacking minerals that can give beer a metallic taste.

When the original Eagle Brewery burned a few years later, the founder built one at today's site on the side of Sharp Mountain, and drew beer from a spring in a nearby cave.

Prior to the 1960s, Norbert said, Yuengling brewery got a majority of its water supply from the pump house that still exists at 10th and Mahantongo streets.

Back then the brewery was producing between 60,000 and 70,000 barrels of beer a year -- and heavy use of the water source dried up the spring. Demand tripled, and that was that