December 19, 2022 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jennifer Yuengling is one of the four 6th generation sisters who are carrying on their great-great-great grandfather's legacy in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and across 26 states. She shares about working with family, the secret to the company's success, and a whole lot more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue here with our American stories, and we
love bringing you stories of family businesses. Today we bring
you the story of a company who recently celebrated their
one hundred and ninetieth anniversary with four members of the
sixth generation in leadership roles. And it just happens to
(00:30):
be America's oldest brewery, Yingling. Here's Jennifer Yangling. Jennifer Yangling,
I'm a sixth generation family member of America's oldest brewery.
I have three sisters and the four of us comprise
the sixth generation of Yngling's. So our dad, Richard Yingling,
fifth generation, current owner and president, has essentially been at
(00:54):
the Helm now for over thirty years since nineteen eighty five.
Were founded in eighteen twenty nine by my great great
great grandfather. He emigrated from Germany, came over here, and
we've learned that he was the youngest of his siblings
and his father was a brewer in Germany. David G.
Yengling realized that he would not have an opportunity to
(01:14):
own and run the family business over there, so he
decided to come to America and settled here in Potsville, Pennsylvania.
The time anthracite coal was becoming quite popular, so were
lots of thirsty coal miners coming home from work every day.
So he built his brewery in downtown Pottsville. It was
actually down on Center Street where our City Hall now stands.
(01:35):
So that built that in eighteen twenty nine was destroyed
by a fire, so in eighteen thirty one he relocated
over to the present site where we are now at
Fifth and Makantanga Streets. We refer to that as our
historic brewery. Built into the side of a mountain, so
there was no electricity, no refrigeration by those means in
those days, so he dug tunnels and to the side
of that mountain to use the natural refrigeration of the
(01:57):
earth to age and logger the beers. So there was
a spring a well not far from that location, so
he used all of the spring water for his brewing needs.
So you had David Yingling, and then he had he
had a couple of sons. His one son, DG. Junior,
he branched off on his own and started a brewery
in Richmond, Virginia called the James River Steam Brewery. I
(02:17):
don't know that David was all that successful because it
only lasted a few years, so it transition then set
to second generation. Third generation was Frank Yeanling, who was
my great grandfather, and he probably was at the helm
longer I'm gonna say sixty some years, longer than any
other owner. Went through a lot of different trials and tribulations,
and probably the biggest one being prohibition, and that was
(02:39):
an act in nineteen eighteen. He really was a true entrepreneur,
learned how to diversify, did a few real estate type ventures,
made near beer and that was one half of one
percent alcohol and that was legal in those days. So
produced near beer to keep many of his workers still
employed thirteen years of not being able to make a
real beer. Then the biggest I think innovation diversification that
(03:02):
he did overall was he built a dairy which is
across the street from the brewery, where he made ice
cream and milk products. As prohibition came to an end,
he had a batch of what he called winter beer,
as though the breweries had won their fight against prohibition,
had that ready the day prohibition was repealed, and had
it delivered to FDR's doorstep the next day. Fourth you
(03:26):
get into my grandfather and his brother there were some
really lean years. You know, you're getting into kind of
the sixties and the seventies there, and it was the
rise of the megabrewers. If you will, you had your Budweiser,
you miller, your cores. Interstate transportation became much more widely
used in Saint Louis, Missouri, and has a Bush could
make their beer and they could get it across the
country much more quickly than they had in the past.
(03:48):
Advertising and merchandising budgets. Marketing budgets became much more popular too,
so a lot of the local brewers, regional brewers started
to either go out of business, families want to run
them anymore, or they simply got bought out by these
by these bigger brewers. And you know, you give that
fourth generation of my grandfather and his brother Dorman a
(04:08):
lot of credit for just hanging in there through those
those lean years because there wasn't a lot of extra
resources and capital to invest, but they were able to
get by. We had a lot of local support from
our community. They supported our brands, and we just we
just like my dad likes to say, we hung in there.
(04:29):
My grandfather became ill in the mid eighties at which
time my dad had broken off from the brewery and
he had his own distributorship, so he hit a local
wholesaler here in town, so he still maintained ties locally.
He had just distanced himself from the plant. So when
his father became ill, he came back into the business,
took it over, and that's when we really started to
(04:50):
see our huge growth trajectory taking aim a couple initiatives
that he did where he invested he had once he
had the ability to invest, he invested him genery, increased
our production efficiencies, and he came out with some good
brands like our our traditional logger brand which is our
flagship today, black and Tan, and then he came out
(05:11):
with a light beer, So some great innovation there too.
And my dad's early years that put us on the
nap and enabled us to broaden our reach and expand
our footprint. I'd like to talk about the founder being
an entrepreneur because obviously he founded his own business, and
I almost think Frank the third generation was very entrepreneurial
and being able to diversify the way he did, and
(05:32):
I think my dad has a lot of those same characteristics.
So he had a vision of number one, this Logger
brand that he wanted to get into consumers hands, a
beer that had more taste, more character than what most
consumers were used to seeing at that time. And you know,
I think my dad, along with Jim Cooke, the owner
of Samuel Adams Boston Burry, essentially pioneers in the craft
(05:54):
brewery movement. You know, they were the first ones to
come out with this beer that looked a little different.
It wasn't yellow, it wasn't that to it. It was
an amber colored beer with a little more flavor to it.
So he had a vision number one. He was an
entrepreneur and I think he had a lot of confidence
in knowing what he wanted to do and very independently
thinking too, but able to surround himself with people, whether
(06:17):
it was in the marketing department the sales department, to
get where he wanted to go. I think he saw that,
you know, the standard yellow pills nurse, they weren't gaining
volume and realized that you can educate consumers to different
styles and different beers that are out there that have
a different flavor profile to them. And he really he
(06:39):
hit it on the mark with our Logger brand. It's
about between seventy and eighty percent of our sales today.
So he grew the business. We had our original historic
Potsful brewery, which he got it to the point where
it was maxed out on capacity. So by the late
nineties we were maxed out over there. We were making
more beer than the brewery was able to sustain. That's
(07:00):
when my sisters and I started to play a role,
because his thinking was, I need to invest here. I
need to invest in this company if I want to
continue to grow. But I don't want to do that
unless I know the next generation is interested. But once
he recognized that we had that commitment and we were,
you know, we were interested in coming into the business,
then he made the decision to build this brewery that
(07:21):
we're sitting in right now. So we call this our
new brewery, even though it is almost twenty years old
and this has been here since since two thousand. At
the same time, though you don't build a brewery in
a day, it takes a couple of years, so we
still had to We still had to get beer into
into our wholesaler's warehouses because we just could not make
enough over in pots Vote. So the timing was appropriate.
(07:45):
He happened to be in Tampa, Florida, and the last
Strobe brewery in the country was up for sale, so
lots of different things, you know, are all coming together
really well there At the timing, the size of the
brewery was good for us, so we bought that stroke plant,
did some child bruise, got a flavor match, and then
all that initial beer came up into our northern markets
(08:06):
to satisfy our wholesaler's needs until we were able to
start pumping beer out of here. So at that point
in time, once we had beer coming out of here,
because start opening markets New York, Maryland, Virginia, and then
the beer from Tampa, we started opening up our southern
markets North South Carolina, Florida, and then we've expanded as
far west it's like Mississippi, Tennessee, and we're currently in
(08:28):
twenty two states. It's amazing having and I would say
it's close to sixty years of industry experience. So I
think every day it's picking his brain, understanding why he
thinks the way he does because he was around and
he remembers those lean days. So he's not quick to
make changes or decisions because we're in this for the
(08:51):
long term. You know, we've been here for one hundred
and ninety years. You know, we say we want to
be here for the next one hundred and ninety years.
And I don't think our aunts usters would have allowed
us to be here this long if they made too
many knee jerk decisions. So he's very he's very meticulous
about his thinking, and I think that's one of the
things that we've all learned from him. Don't don't jump
(09:12):
into something or jump on a trend or a fad
just because everybody else is because some of those guys
might not be here tomorrow. Our goal is to be
here for the next several generations. And you've been listening
to Jennifer Yingling and the voice of the sixth generation
of Yenglings survived some really lean years in the sixties
and seventies when companies like Cores and Budweiser, the mass
(09:35):
retailers were at it, But in the end, really they
were the pioneers in this area, along with the Samuel
Adams folks and my goodness exploding now today when we return,
we're going to continue with the story of this sixth
generation family business, and with Jennifer Yingling here on our
American stories, and we continue here with our American stories
(10:11):
in the story of Yengling, America's oldest brewery, which just
celebrated it's one hundred and ninetieth anniversary. The company's success
has come in part from their patients. Let's get back
to Jennifer. The seventies is when light beers started to develop,
and I think we didn't come out with a light
(10:32):
beer till the late eighties, so you know, we gave
it time to make sure it's something that's gonna stick
before we just jump on the bandwagon say we're gonna,
We're gonna, We're gonna change our model, because our whole
business model is kind of about scale and volume. So
we run we run very few products, we make them well,
and we set up our production lines and we don't
do a lot of changeovers, and we're extremely efficient in that.
(10:55):
And we need to be because a small I say
that relatively small brewery today playing in the same swimming
pool with the global brewers, we have to be very
meticulous with maintaining those efficiencies and saving Moneys. Grew up
in Pottsville, went to college not too far from here,
(11:18):
kind of did a year after college, not knowing what
I wanted to do at a little bit of coaching,
went on to graduate school, got my graduate degree, and
it was during that time I was just finishing that
up when we had that kind of like come to
Jesus meeting with our dad, like what do you guys
want to do with your lives? And I didn't have
a job lined up, didn't know where I was heading.
I mean, I had some thoughts, but the timing was
(11:40):
right for me. Then I was like, okay, I'll come home.
You know about a home here, and you know, I
was twenty plus years ago the map to where I
am now. In operations. I found that on my own.
You know, just decided sales and marketing wasn't really my thing,
Accounting wasn't my thing, but I immersed myself in the
(12:02):
operations end of it. Went through a training program. It
was pretty rigorous, everything from incoming raw materials through the
brewing process, hot side fermentation, storage, filtration, packaging, warehousing, logistics
so you know, soup to nuts. Um. Went went to
school then, which is like a ten week brewing course,
(12:22):
and you know, I have found my own way and
along the along the years, I've tried to take some
of the responsibilities off my dad's hands, like scheduling, ordering materials,
and you know, tried to make life easier for him
at the same time learning learning from him how he
does things. So so that guided me. And you know,
I'm in the role of VP of operations right now,
(12:45):
so I was Actually I was the first one to
come on board, and then Debbie and then Wendy and Cheryl.
Slowly we each took our took our own paths to
get where we where we are. We each have very
different personalities in one respect, but interest I think more so.
So like I mentioned, I gravitated into operations. Wendy runs
(13:07):
our sales and marketing. Debbie does a lot with our
employees and our cultural engagement and share it works in
order services, so we don't overlap a lot, and I
think that's a big part of our success because I
think if we were overlapping too much and tripping over
each other, we would probably struggle to make decisions. Whereas
because we have our own kind of areas of responsibilities,
(13:27):
it works out well for us. We each have different
areas of expertise, so it's a matter of respecting the
others expertise and their area, you know, and still the
ultimate decision maker is our dad, like because he's you know,
he's here every single day and he's earned that right.
But I think there's that comfort factor and that we
(13:48):
have different ways of thinking sometimes, but in the end,
what's best for the business is important to all of us.
So that's I think that's generally how we resolve, you know,
anything that comes up that needs to be that needs
to be decided. I think there's been some things, I
don't want to say it was a mistake, but things
(14:09):
that we've done that maybe we've taken our eye off of.
And I'm going to refer to our core brands. An
example would be seasonals. We started making seasonals a few
years ago, and I think so what we would do
is we transition. We'd have Octoberfest in the fall, and
then we would roll into an ipl and our version
of an IPI it's an India pail lagger, and then
(14:31):
we would roll into summer week and then that would
be cyclical. And they were great brands. Consumers love them,
our brewers enjoyed making them. We had great packaging. But
I think we learned that they became a bit of
a distraction. So our operations people were spending a lot
of time and being inefficient because we were making these brands.
(14:51):
Our salespeople were trying. We're pushing these brands and gaining
shelf space with wholesalers and retailers. But in the meantime,
we took our focus off of our logger brand, and
I think we took a step back and we realized, like,
this is our bread and butter, this is what we
have to put first and foremosts So we decided to
step back from seasonals a bit. We still make our
(15:11):
October Fest, we've kind of mothballed the other recipes for
the time being. We keep things very simple. We don't
overcomplicate things. We work hard. We expect everybody in the
company to work hard. There's no sense of entitlement for anybody.
We expect our people to think for themselves, figure problems out.
We don't have a lot of layers. We're not corporate.
(15:34):
If an hourly employee needs something, that individual has accessibility
not just to my sisters and me and obviously here's
or her manager, but to our dad. So we have
a strong presence as a family across our across our
employees and even our wholesalers. We look at ourselves too
as a multigenerational, family owned company. But we're also very
(15:58):
proud of the generations of employees that we have in
our company too. So another kind of fun fact is
that we've determined that ten percent of our employees, and
we have probably around three hundred and fifty employees, ten
percent of those either have or have had a family
member work here. So that's that's kind of that's that's
very important to us, and it shows that we're we're
(16:21):
dedicated to our employees, they're passionate about us and we
they're and able to have opportunities as well. So between
our two breweries here in Pennsylvania were separated by our
Tampa brewery by roughly a thousand miles, but there's there's
been folks who have transitioned from one brewery to another.
(16:41):
So it's you know, we have folks who started here
as a one individual, in particular as a forklift operator.
He worked his way up to a lead and he's
now our packaging manager in Tampa. So it's that opportunity
and that training and growth and development that I had
as a family member to grow through the company, but
that we're able to support our employees with as well.
(17:06):
I can think of another example of um. He's our
plant coordinator over Impossible, and he started here in his
early twenties. Clean tanks is what he did. It's kind
of like the lowest job in the brewery is the
clean tanks, clean tanks, worked in the racking room, worked
his way up to a brewer brewed cleaned brewing equipment.
When we brought this plant online, he was instrumental in
(17:28):
getting this started up again, working from the bottom up,
and he was our brewing manager for several years. And
now he has ownership of our possible plants, so everybody
and everything over there falls under his jurisdiction. As you know,
he works here, his wife works here in the counting department.
His two daughters, when they were going through college, they
worked for his part time. His son is a brewer
(17:48):
over Impossible. So you kind of get that that same theme,
that family theme that we have with quite a few
of our employees. We have folks who start here maybe
when they're eighteen years old, and they retire when they're
sixty five. Every generation leaves its mark. My dad's is
obviously the tremendous growth that we've experienced during his tenure.
(18:09):
And we're not a company that does things too quickly,
and we joked taken us one hundred and ninty years
to get to where we are, and we want the
successive generations coming after us to have those same opportunities.
And we want to leave this brewery in good hands,
viable sustainable sustainability. We want to be conscious of our
(18:30):
environment as well, So I think just leaving it a
good company for the next generation is important to us.
And you've been listening to Jennifer Yengling and the voice
of the sixth generation of Yenglings, and that is one
hundred and ninety years they've been together, and there's no
(18:51):
doubt they'll be together another one hundred and ninety. Listening
to the care with which Shay run things. By the way,
it was so interesting that they didn't see this merely
as a family business, but it was a family business.
It as it relates to the workers, these small businesses
propel the nation. They're the ones that turn into bigger business.
Three hundred and fifty employees, that's three hundred and fifty families.
(19:13):
This small business is taken care of the Yingling story
of what a voice. Jennifer's is VP of Operations. There
the Yngling story here on our American story.
And we continue here with our American stories, and we
love bringing you stories of family businesses. Today we bring
you the story of a company who recently celebrated their
one hundred and ninetieth anniversary with four members of the
sixth generation in leadership roles. And it just happens to
(00:30):
be America's oldest brewery, Yingling. Here's Jennifer Yangling. Jennifer Yangling,
I'm a sixth generation family member of America's oldest brewery.
I have three sisters and the four of us comprise
the sixth generation of Yngling's. So our dad, Richard Yingling,
fifth generation, current owner and president, has essentially been at
(00:54):
the Helm now for over thirty years since nineteen eighty five.
Were founded in eighteen twenty nine by my great great
great grandfather. He emigrated from Germany, came over here, and
we've learned that he was the youngest of his siblings
and his father was a brewer in Germany. David G.
Yengling realized that he would not have an opportunity to
(01:14):
own and run the family business over there, so he
decided to come to America and settled here in Potsville, Pennsylvania.
The time anthracite coal was becoming quite popular, so were
lots of thirsty coal miners coming home from work every day.
So he built his brewery in downtown Pottsville. It was
actually down on Center Street where our City Hall now stands.
(01:35):
So that built that in eighteen twenty nine was destroyed
by a fire, so in eighteen thirty one he relocated
over to the present site where we are now at
Fifth and Makantanga Streets. We refer to that as our
historic brewery. Built into the side of a mountain, so
there was no electricity, no refrigeration by those means in
those days, so he dug tunnels and to the side
of that mountain to use the natural refrigeration of the
(01:57):
earth to age and logger the beers. So there was
a spring a well not far from that location, so
he used all of the spring water for his brewing needs.
So you had David Yingling, and then he had he
had a couple of sons. His one son, DG. Junior,
he branched off on his own and started a brewery
in Richmond, Virginia called the James River Steam Brewery. I
(02:17):
don't know that David was all that successful because it
only lasted a few years, so it transition then set
to second generation. Third generation was Frank Yeanling, who was
my great grandfather, and he probably was at the helm
longer I'm gonna say sixty some years, longer than any
other owner. Went through a lot of different trials and tribulations,
and probably the biggest one being prohibition, and that was
(02:39):
an act in nineteen eighteen. He really was a true entrepreneur,
learned how to diversify, did a few real estate type ventures,
made near beer and that was one half of one
percent alcohol and that was legal in those days. So
produced near beer to keep many of his workers still
employed thirteen years of not being able to make a
real beer. Then the biggest I think innovation diversification that
(03:02):
he did overall was he built a dairy which is
across the street from the brewery, where he made ice
cream and milk products. As prohibition came to an end,
he had a batch of what he called winter beer,
as though the breweries had won their fight against prohibition,
had that ready the day prohibition was repealed, and had
it delivered to FDR's doorstep the next day. Fourth you
(03:26):
get into my grandfather and his brother there were some
really lean years. You know, you're getting into kind of
the sixties and the seventies there, and it was the
rise of the megabrewers. If you will, you had your Budweiser,
you miller, your cores. Interstate transportation became much more widely
used in Saint Louis, Missouri, and has a Bush could
make their beer and they could get it across the
country much more quickly than they had in the past.
(03:48):
Advertising and merchandising budgets. Marketing budgets became much more popular too,
so a lot of the local brewers, regional brewers started
to either go out of business, families want to run
them anymore, or they simply got bought out by these
by these bigger brewers. And you know, you give that
fourth generation of my grandfather and his brother Dorman a
(04:08):
lot of credit for just hanging in there through those
those lean years because there wasn't a lot of extra
resources and capital to invest, but they were able to
get by. We had a lot of local support from
our community. They supported our brands, and we just we
just like my dad likes to say, we hung in there.
(04:29):
My grandfather became ill in the mid eighties at which
time my dad had broken off from the brewery and
he had his own distributorship, so he hit a local
wholesaler here in town, so he still maintained ties locally.
He had just distanced himself from the plant. So when
his father became ill, he came back into the business,
took it over, and that's when we really started to
(04:50):
see our huge growth trajectory taking aim a couple initiatives
that he did where he invested he had once he
had the ability to invest, he invested him genery, increased
our production efficiencies, and he came out with some good
brands like our our traditional logger brand which is our
flagship today, black and Tan, and then he came out
(05:11):
with a light beer, So some great innovation there too.
And my dad's early years that put us on the
nap and enabled us to broaden our reach and expand
our footprint. I'd like to talk about the founder being
an entrepreneur because obviously he founded his own business, and
I almost think Frank the third generation was very entrepreneurial
and being able to diversify the way he did, and
(05:32):
I think my dad has a lot of those same characteristics.
So he had a vision of number one, this Logger
brand that he wanted to get into consumers hands, a
beer that had more taste, more character than what most
consumers were used to seeing at that time. And you know,
I think my dad, along with Jim Cooke, the owner
of Samuel Adams Boston Burry, essentially pioneers in the craft
(05:54):
brewery movement. You know, they were the first ones to
come out with this beer that looked a little different.
It wasn't yellow, it wasn't that to it. It was
an amber colored beer with a little more flavor to it.
So he had a vision number one. He was an
entrepreneur and I think he had a lot of confidence
in knowing what he wanted to do and very independently
thinking too, but able to surround himself with people, whether
(06:17):
it was in the marketing department the sales department, to
get where he wanted to go. I think he saw that,
you know, the standard yellow pills nurse, they weren't gaining
volume and realized that you can educate consumers to different
styles and different beers that are out there that have
a different flavor profile to them. And he really he
(06:39):
hit it on the mark with our Logger brand. It's
about between seventy and eighty percent of our sales today.
So he grew the business. We had our original historic
Potsful brewery, which he got it to the point where
it was maxed out on capacity. So by the late
nineties we were maxed out over there. We were making
more beer than the brewery was able to sustain. That's
(07:00):
when my sisters and I started to play a role,
because his thinking was, I need to invest here. I
need to invest in this company if I want to
continue to grow. But I don't want to do that
unless I know the next generation is interested. But once
he recognized that we had that commitment and we were,
you know, we were interested in coming into the business,
then he made the decision to build this brewery that
(07:21):
we're sitting in right now. So we call this our
new brewery, even though it is almost twenty years old
and this has been here since since two thousand. At
the same time, though you don't build a brewery in
a day, it takes a couple of years, so we
still had to We still had to get beer into
into our wholesaler's warehouses because we just could not make
enough over in pots Vote. So the timing was appropriate.
(07:45):
He happened to be in Tampa, Florida, and the last
Strobe brewery in the country was up for sale, so
lots of different things, you know, are all coming together
really well there At the timing, the size of the
brewery was good for us, so we bought that stroke plant,
did some child bruise, got a flavor match, and then
all that initial beer came up into our northern markets
(08:06):
to satisfy our wholesaler's needs until we were able to
start pumping beer out of here. So at that point
in time, once we had beer coming out of here,
because start opening markets New York, Maryland, Virginia, and then
the beer from Tampa, we started opening up our southern
markets North South Carolina, Florida, and then we've expanded as
far west it's like Mississippi, Tennessee, and we're currently in
(08:28):
twenty two states. It's amazing having and I would say
it's close to sixty years of industry experience. So I
think every day it's picking his brain, understanding why he
thinks the way he does because he was around and
he remembers those lean days. So he's not quick to
make changes or decisions because we're in this for the
(08:51):
long term. You know, we've been here for one hundred
and ninety years. You know, we say we want to
be here for the next one hundred and ninety years.
And I don't think our aunts usters would have allowed
us to be here this long if they made too
many knee jerk decisions. So he's very he's very meticulous
about his thinking, and I think that's one of the
things that we've all learned from him. Don't don't jump
(09:12):
into something or jump on a trend or a fad
just because everybody else is because some of those guys
might not be here tomorrow. Our goal is to be
here for the next several generations. And you've been listening
to Jennifer Yingling and the voice of the sixth generation
of Yenglings survived some really lean years in the sixties
and seventies when companies like Cores and Budweiser, the mass
(09:35):
retailers were at it, But in the end, really they
were the pioneers in this area, along with the Samuel
Adams folks and my goodness exploding now today when we return,
we're going to continue with the story of this sixth
generation family business, and with Jennifer Yingling here on our
American stories, and we continue here with our American stories
(10:11):
in the story of Yengling, America's oldest brewery, which just
celebrated it's one hundred and ninetieth anniversary. The company's success
has come in part from their patients. Let's get back
to Jennifer. The seventies is when light beers started to develop,
and I think we didn't come out with a light
(10:32):
beer till the late eighties, so you know, we gave
it time to make sure it's something that's gonna stick
before we just jump on the bandwagon say we're gonna,
We're gonna, We're gonna change our model, because our whole
business model is kind of about scale and volume. So
we run we run very few products, we make them well,
and we set up our production lines and we don't
do a lot of changeovers, and we're extremely efficient in that.
(10:55):
And we need to be because a small I say
that relatively small brewery today playing in the same swimming
pool with the global brewers, we have to be very
meticulous with maintaining those efficiencies and saving Moneys. Grew up
in Pottsville, went to college not too far from here,
(11:18):
kind of did a year after college, not knowing what
I wanted to do at a little bit of coaching,
went on to graduate school, got my graduate degree, and
it was during that time I was just finishing that
up when we had that kind of like come to
Jesus meeting with our dad, like what do you guys
want to do with your lives? And I didn't have
a job lined up, didn't know where I was heading.
I mean, I had some thoughts, but the timing was
(11:40):
right for me. Then I was like, okay, I'll come home.
You know about a home here, and you know, I
was twenty plus years ago the map to where I
am now. In operations. I found that on my own.
You know, just decided sales and marketing wasn't really my thing,
Accounting wasn't my thing, but I immersed myself in the
(12:02):
operations end of it. Went through a training program. It
was pretty rigorous, everything from incoming raw materials through the
brewing process, hot side fermentation, storage, filtration, packaging, warehousing, logistics
so you know, soup to nuts. Um. Went went to
school then, which is like a ten week brewing course,
(12:22):
and you know, I have found my own way and
along the along the years, I've tried to take some
of the responsibilities off my dad's hands, like scheduling, ordering materials,
and you know, tried to make life easier for him
at the same time learning learning from him how he
does things. So so that guided me. And you know,
I'm in the role of VP of operations right now,
(12:45):
so I was Actually I was the first one to
come on board, and then Debbie and then Wendy and Cheryl.
Slowly we each took our took our own paths to
get where we where we are. We each have very
different personalities in one respect, but interest I think more so.
So like I mentioned, I gravitated into operations. Wendy runs
(13:07):
our sales and marketing. Debbie does a lot with our
employees and our cultural engagement and share it works in
order services, so we don't overlap a lot, and I
think that's a big part of our success because I
think if we were overlapping too much and tripping over
each other, we would probably struggle to make decisions. Whereas
because we have our own kind of areas of responsibilities,
(13:27):
it works out well for us. We each have different
areas of expertise, so it's a matter of respecting the
others expertise and their area, you know, and still the
ultimate decision maker is our dad, like because he's you know,
he's here every single day and he's earned that right.
But I think there's that comfort factor and that we
(13:48):
have different ways of thinking sometimes, but in the end,
what's best for the business is important to all of us.
So that's I think that's generally how we resolve, you know,
anything that comes up that needs to be that needs
to be decided. I think there's been some things, I
don't want to say it was a mistake, but things
(14:09):
that we've done that maybe we've taken our eye off of.
And I'm going to refer to our core brands. An
example would be seasonals. We started making seasonals a few
years ago, and I think so what we would do
is we transition. We'd have Octoberfest in the fall, and
then we would roll into an ipl and our version
of an IPI it's an India pail lagger, and then
(14:31):
we would roll into summer week and then that would
be cyclical. And they were great brands. Consumers love them,
our brewers enjoyed making them. We had great packaging. But
I think we learned that they became a bit of
a distraction. So our operations people were spending a lot
of time and being inefficient because we were making these brands.
(14:51):
Our salespeople were trying. We're pushing these brands and gaining
shelf space with wholesalers and retailers. But in the meantime,
we took our focus off of our logger brand, and
I think we took a step back and we realized, like,
this is our bread and butter, this is what we
have to put first and foremosts So we decided to
step back from seasonals a bit. We still make our
(15:11):
October Fest, we've kind of mothballed the other recipes for
the time being. We keep things very simple. We don't
overcomplicate things. We work hard. We expect everybody in the
company to work hard. There's no sense of entitlement for anybody.
We expect our people to think for themselves, figure problems out.
We don't have a lot of layers. We're not corporate.
(15:34):
If an hourly employee needs something, that individual has accessibility
not just to my sisters and me and obviously here's
or her manager, but to our dad. So we have
a strong presence as a family across our across our
employees and even our wholesalers. We look at ourselves too
as a multigenerational, family owned company. But we're also very
(15:58):
proud of the generations of employees that we have in
our company too. So another kind of fun fact is
that we've determined that ten percent of our employees, and
we have probably around three hundred and fifty employees, ten
percent of those either have or have had a family
member work here. So that's that's kind of that's that's
very important to us, and it shows that we're we're
(16:21):
dedicated to our employees, they're passionate about us and we
they're and able to have opportunities as well. So between
our two breweries here in Pennsylvania were separated by our
Tampa brewery by roughly a thousand miles, but there's there's
been folks who have transitioned from one brewery to another.
(16:41):
So it's you know, we have folks who started here
as a one individual, in particular as a forklift operator.
He worked his way up to a lead and he's
now our packaging manager in Tampa. So it's that opportunity
and that training and growth and development that I had
as a family member to grow through the company, but
that we're able to support our employees with as well.
(17:06):
I can think of another example of um. He's our
plant coordinator over Impossible, and he started here in his
early twenties. Clean tanks is what he did. It's kind
of like the lowest job in the brewery is the
clean tanks, clean tanks, worked in the racking room, worked
his way up to a brewer brewed cleaned brewing equipment.
When we brought this plant online, he was instrumental in
(17:28):
getting this started up again, working from the bottom up,
and he was our brewing manager for several years. And
now he has ownership of our possible plants, so everybody
and everything over there falls under his jurisdiction. As you know,
he works here, his wife works here in the counting department.
His two daughters, when they were going through college, they
worked for his part time. His son is a brewer
(17:48):
over Impossible. So you kind of get that that same theme,
that family theme that we have with quite a few
of our employees. We have folks who start here maybe
when they're eighteen years old, and they retire when they're
sixty five. Every generation leaves its mark. My dad's is
obviously the tremendous growth that we've experienced during his tenure.
(18:09):
And we're not a company that does things too quickly,
and we joked taken us one hundred and ninty years
to get to where we are, and we want the
successive generations coming after us to have those same opportunities.
And we want to leave this brewery in good hands,
viable sustainable sustainability. We want to be conscious of our
(18:30):
environment as well, So I think just leaving it a
good company for the next generation is important to us.
And you've been listening to Jennifer Yengling and the voice
of the sixth generation of Yenglings, and that is one
hundred and ninety years they've been together, and there's no
(18:51):
doubt they'll be together another one hundred and ninety. Listening
to the care with which Shay run things. By the way,
it was so interesting that they didn't see this merely
as a family business, but it was a family business.
It as it relates to the workers, these small businesses
propel the nation. They're the ones that turn into bigger business.
Three hundred and fifty employees, that's three hundred and fifty families.
(19:13):
This small business is taken care of the Yingling story
of what a voice. Jennifer's is VP of Operations. There
the Yngling story here on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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